1st Person: Kill the Death Penalty

5/14/2009 Anti-death penalty activist and new grandmother Delane Sims sums up California's death penalty: it's arbitrary, biased, completely ineffective and unbelievably expensive. Sims explains how shifting our priorities can help end the cycle of violence in Oakland.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Recent news stories have focused on the dramatic increase in violence in Oakland.

As an Oakland resident, this trend scares me to death. I've already lost two family members to murder. I'm a mother of seven children, and I need this cycle of violence to end.

I hear lots of solutions bandied about. But there's been little attention given to one of the most effective ways to fight crime: end the death penalty.

Why? Because the death penalty has been found to be arbitrary, biased, and completely ineffective at deterring crime -- and because it sucks funds away from other solutions that have actually been found to work.

Here's what I mean by "arbitrary": A resident of Alameda County is nearly eight times more likely to be sentenced to death than a resident of Santa Clara County for the same crime.

The death penalty is used three or four times more often when the victim is white than when the victim is African American or Latino. And most cases in which the victim is a person of color go unsolved.

And yet our strapped state budget includes $250 million to fund death row just this year.

This enormous cost takes a local toll. In Alameda County alone, every time the district attorney pursues an execution, county taxpayers fork out at least $1.1 million more than we would for a trial seeking permanent imprisonment. That's just the cost to the county for prosecuting the case.

These are resources that could be used to make us all safer.

• To fund more skilled technicians to analyze DNA and other forensic evidence;
• To relocate witnesses who are too scared to testify;
• To retain more prosecutors and investigators to work with police on the most difficult cases.

And to invest in education. Researchers from the California Dropout Research Project estimate that if Oakland cut its dropout rate in half, the city would have 805 fewer homicides and aggravated assaults each year.

Imagine a 30 or 40 percent increase in graduation rates in Oakland alone--the positive impact on the city would be amazing.

Why don't we do away with the death penalty and condemn people to die in prison instead? Most prisoners who are on death row end up dying of old age anyway. They are dying. They will die. Let's stop spending our money on the pretense of killing them faster.

Replacing California's death penalty with permanent imprisonment will allow us to invest in our schools, and to make every unsolved murder a priority. It's time shift our priorities. We'll all be safer.

Delane Sims is a community organizer with the Alameda County Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.