Community Corner
POLL: Should California Voters End The Death Penalty To Save Money?
"The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and now I think there's very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose."
In 1978, a state ballot initiative written by Donald Heller, a former prosecutor, gave California one of the strongest death penalty laws in America.
Now Heller and others are working to ban capital punishment via a November vote.
“It’s been a colossal failure,” Heller told The New York Times. “The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and now I think there’s very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose.”
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Would you vote to end the death penalty in the state and make the sentence life without possibility of parole?
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