California Death Penalty Case Study

It seems as though the state of California has been on a continuum with the death penalty. Historically, executions were carried out by firing squads, hangings, gas chambers and lethal injection. In 1972, the Supreme Court of California ruled in People v. Anderson that the current death penalty laws were unconstitutional and called for a suspension of capital punishment. Then was reinstated in 1978 with executions carried out in the gas chambers at San Quentin State Prison. With the introduction of the standard lethal injection in 1993, it has been modified to support the new chamber specifically for lethal injection. As of 2014, the state of California has barred capital punishment, having been declared unconstitutional by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney. He stated that the decades-long delays caused by California failure to provide lawyers for nearly 350 of its death-row prisoners made its death penalty system unconstitutionally cruel and unusual and the random few whom California eventually executes to date, just 13 out of more than 900 individuals sentenced to death will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary (“Ninth Circuit,” 2015). However, California’s death penalty is back on the clock moving slowly toward resuming executions. In the works, is the revision of lethal injection protocol from the three-drug cocktail that some have argued as flawed and inhumane to a new single drug procedure,

There is no significant effect on crime rates. Overall, as the use of the death penalty has declined, the murder rate has continued to fall. In California, the murder rate as of 2013 is at a 4.6 rate which is down from 5.0 (“UCR,” 2013). California continues to waste millions of dollars on death penalty trials. Our tax dollars continue to pay for prisoners’ housing and