California Legal professional Common Rob Bonta sees state shifting away from dying penalty

As lawmaker, Rob Bonta co-sponsored a proposed election measure that would have given Californians another chance to overturn the death penalty, a repeal they narrowly opposed in 2012 and 2016.

As California’s attorney general, Bonta is still against the death penalty and believes the state is moving in the same direction.

“I think the death penalty is inhuman. It doesn’t deter. Studies show that it had different effects on defendants of color for a long time, especially when the victim is white, “Bonta said in an interview. Three weeks earlier, his former legislative colleagues had confirmed Governor Gavin Newsom’s nomination of the Alameda Democrat to succeed Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the US Secretary of State for Health and Human Services.

Bonta said the death penalty was both irreversible and “fallible,” citing the exoneration and release of numerous death row inmates across the country – 185 since 1973, including five in California, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The nonprofit says it has also found “strong evidence” that at least 20 prisoners executed since 1989, all in southern states, were actually innocent.

Despite the nationwide votes over the past decade, Bonta said he thought California was “on the way to ending the death penalty. I think this is the way to get there, away from mass imprisonment, over-criminalization and over-condemnation.

“The Californians said that about the people who voted them into office,” he said.

One of them was Newsom, who announced a moratorium on executions shortly after taking office in 2019. Others included Bonta’s three attorney general predecessors, Becerra, Kamala Harris, and Jerry Brown, all of whom stood against the death penalty.

But when the Californians voted directly on the death penalty, they approved it: in 1972, when they overturned a Supreme Court ruling declaring it a violation of the state constitution; 1978, when they expanded a death penalty law that legislature passed over Governor Brown’s veto; and in 2012 and 2016, when majorities of 52% and 53% rejected initiatives to reduce the maximum sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

Although Newsom and a group of prosecutors have asked the state Supreme Court to make it harder to obtain death sentences by tightening standards for jury deliberation and voting in capital cases, there is no pending death penalty appeal in California. So the only current path to a repeal seems to be another electoral measure, which proponents say won’t happen until at least 2024.

Things could change if Newsom was recalled and replaced with a Republican who would almost certainly lift its moratorium and seek execution dates for more than 20 convicted prisoners who have lost all appeals against their convictions and sentences. This would revive a legal challenge to California’s lethal injections procedures, which 15 years ago a federal judge found so flawed that they posed an unreasonable risk of prolonged and excruciating death.

The state, which has 704 inmates on death row, has not executed anyone since January 2006, while 103 convicted inmates have died in prison, mostly of natural causes – 22 since the coronavirus pandemic began last spring. Bonta said he needed more study before deciding whether to defend the current method of executing individual drugs.

“Part of my role is to be the administrator of the law,” he said, “but I will not defend something that is unconstitutional.” It has nothing to do with my personal convictions ”but rather whether there is evidence that the injection procedures could cause an“ unnecessarily slow and painful death ”.

Bonta will appear to be a more confident opponent of the death penalty than others in high office. Harris and Brown, for example, were publicly silent on the 2012 and 2016 overturn initiatives, and Harris appealed to restore the state’s death penalty law in 2015 after a federal judge ruled that the law was no longer constitutional due to arbitrary delays of 25 years or longer in crucial cases.

Bonta’s appointment “bodes well for the state and those of us who are interested in this issue,” said Mike Farrell, former “MASH” star, president of Death Penalty Focus, a Sacramento-based anti-death penalty -Group, is.

Anne Marie Schubert, District Attorney for Sacramento, is a challenger in next year’s attorney general election and says voters shouldn’t expect a strong defense of the death penalty or its implementation from an opponent like Bonta.

“Voter will should matter,” and “attitudes can have an impact,” said Schubert, a former Republican who became independent and advocated the death penalty. “You say, ‘We are going to defend the death penalty,’ but are you going to delay cases and divert resources away from the Capital Disputes Department?”

She said she was particularly concerned about a bill pending in the Legislature, AB1224, by Congregation Member Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, that would allow for a review of an inmate’s previous death or life sentence without parole. Levine was the lead author of the proposed constitutional amendment to repeal the death penalty, which Bonta endorsed in 2019.

AB1224 would allow a judge to reduce any of these sentences to life with the option of parole after considering the inmate’s age, mental health, and records of the inmate in prison. If the inmate has served at least 20 years without violence, the judge would have to reduce the sentence unless prosecutors can show that the inmate would commit violent acts in the future. Backed by public defenders and rejected by prosecutors, the move would require two-thirds approval in the Assembly and Senate and the governor’s signature to become law.

By overturning existing death or life sentences without parole, “you are destroying families who were promised by judges that these people would never get out,” said Schubert. She said such a reversal of longstanding state policy appears to be part of Bonta’s agenda.

Bonta did not take a position on AB1224, but said he would be willing to ask judges to reconsider individual death sentences – as long as all sides agree on a case.

He said he plans to “work with prosecutors and family members of victims who want to go to court together to punish an accused of the death penalty for anything else, such as life without parole or some other sentence.”

“I will show ways to advance reforms in the criminal justice system in general and in relation to the death penalty in particular,” said Bonta.

Bob Egelko is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko