Letter to Jackie Lacey RE Death Penalty |

Honorable Jackie Lacey

211 West Temple Street
Suite 1200
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Dear District Attorney Jackie Lacey:

We are the families of murder victims, the families of those sitting on death row, exonerees, and members of the faith community, and we stand together in our opposition to your office’s continued use of the death penalty. The death penalty is deeply flawed, wastes a massive amount of taxpayer resources, causes additional harm to many victims’ families, and creates an unnecessary risk that the state will put an innocent person to death.

In light of the moratorium, and the fact that Angelenos have voted to end the death penalty twice, the fact that you continue to use this draconian method is backwards and shameful. Since 2012, your office has sent more people to death row than the states of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia combined, and this singular focus on punishment comes at the expense of safety, equity, redemption, and justice.

Second only to the unbearable loss of losing a loved one to violence is the pain of endless legal proceedings that keep us suffering in courtrooms for decades. That’s an injustice for our families, particularly in those instances in which your office seeks the death penalty irrespective of our wishes.

Furthermore, state sanctioned killings do not deter crime, but in light of the unequal application of the death penalty to communities of color it does inflict an extraordinary amount of harm to the moral authority of our justice system. Nationally, White victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, but 80% of all capital cases involve white victims. Indeed, there are troubling racial disparities abound in your application of the death penalty; 22 of the 23 people you have sent to death row are people of color.

Equally horrifying, however, is the ever-present risk of putting an innocent person to death. A 2014 peer-reviewed study concluded that at approximately 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the U.S. in the modern era could be innocent. The chilling truth is that our country has likely executed innocent people for crimes they did not commit. That is not justice, that is a murder perpetrated by the state.

No one has been put to death in California for years – but we keep paying for it. California has spent more than $5 billion since 1978 prosecuting death penalty cases and maintaining a death row that currently houses 728 individuals. During that time, however, only 13 death sentences have been carried out, which equates to an outrageous cost of $384 million per execution.

We ask that you respond immediately with your commitment to end this practice. The death penalty is morally dubious at best and it’s time to end it.

Sincerely,

The undersigned*

Mariana Arroyo