Dozens of the 737 inmates on the California’s death row are innocent – Gov. Gavin Newsom

Concurring opinion written by Associate Justice Goodwin Liu and Associate Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar who are member of the California highest court has on Thursday, 28th March, 2019 taken a swipe on capital punishment by branding it an “expensive and dysfunctional system” that fails to deliver timely justice. The two Supreme Court justices were both appointees of Governor Gavin Newsom’s predecessor and fellow Democrat, Jerry Brown.

The opinions of Goodwin Liu and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar were in a concurring opinion to a ruling that unanimously affirmed the death sentence of a convicted killer. This occurred at the court’s first death penalty decision since Governor Gavin Newsom two weeks ago imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in the nation’s most populous state (California).

In their submission, they stressed that their criticism of the death penalty had nothing to do with “morality or constitutionality of the death penalty,” and expressed empathy for victims and their families.

In their commentary, the justices pointed to the case at hand in the appeal of Thomas Potts, condemned in 1998 for the hatchet-stabbing murders and robbery of an elderly couple in their Hanford, California, home, where Potts worked as a part-time handyman.

In their own words, they stated, “Now, 21 years later, we affirm the judgment on direct appeal, but there is more litigation to come in the form of habeas corpus petitions in state and federal courts.”

They added that such a timeline is typical in capital cases, adding that “serious challenges” in the fair, efficient administration of the death penalty “have not been meaningfully addressed” for decades.

They stressed that, “As a result, California’s death penalty is an expensive and dysfunctional system that does not deliver justice or closure in a timely manner, if at all. Voters passed a 2016 ballot measure to speed up the process, but that initiative has failed to work, largely because it lacked additional funding needed to implement necessary reforms.”

However, the justices have stated that when the law requires it, they would continue to uphold death sentences.

Governor Gavin Newsom has clarified that the major factor in ordering a halt to execution in California is his personal conscience. He stated that he has concerns that dozens of the 737 inmates on the state’s death row were innocent and had issued a statement on Thursday 28th March, 2019 praising the concurring opinion of two justices.

Records have it California have the largest number of inmates on death row in the United States, the last person to death in California was in 2006. As the state moved toward resuming capital punishment after developing a new protocol for lethal injections, Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a moratorium on executions of current death row inmates.

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