Tyrone Harts sneaked into his former girlfriend’s house while Brandi Morales and her six children slept. He beat her, shot her to death and then lit her body on fire. Her two little boys tried to douse the flames with cups of water from the kitchen sink. Her two little girls fanned smoke away with sofa cushions.

Francisco Zavala stabbed Eric Sargeant Jr while stealing his cellphone. The 16-year-old died from his wounds.

Harts was the first person sentenced to death in Riverside County in 2015, a year when the southern California region sent more people to death row than any other county in the United States. Zavala was the eighth and final.

Insofar as sentencing goes, the county, east of Los Angeles, was the death penalty capital of America.

The two men and the county where they murdered are exhibit A for what is wrong with the death penalty in California, a broken process whose future is on the ballot in November. That’s when voters – through dueling measures – will face some of the thorniest questions confronting the justice system.

To kill or not to kill? Which murderers, if any, deserve to die for their crimes? Should geography decide who is executed and who is not?

Proposition 62 is the simpler of the two measures before voters. Titled the Justice That Works Act, it would replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole. It would require offenders to work and pay restitution. Its supporters say it would save California taxpayers $150m annually.



Proposition 66, the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act, would streamline the lengthy appeals process for condemned inmates, expand the pool of attorneys available for appeals, and allow the state to place those on death row in cheaper housing as they await execution. Supporters say it would save “tens of millions of dollars” each year.

Proponents of the opposing measures agree on just one thing: that the death penalty in the Golden State does not work.

Or as Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the former president and first lady, said when endorsing Proposition 62 in July: “We believe that the attempt to administer the death penalty in a fair and efficient manner has failed.”

California currently has 746 men and women on death row, more than any other state in the country. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters

California currently has 746 men and women on death row, more than any other state in the country. The oldest is 86; 11% are senior citizens. The average stay is 18 years. No one has been executed in California in more than a decade.

And no one condemned in Riverside County has ever been executed, even though its voters wholeheartedly support execution and its courts are responsible for 89 defendants currently on death row. Per capita, that is 73% higher than Los Angeles County, its much larger neighbor to the north.

The disparity underscores a major complaint of death penalty opponents: that the ultimate punishment as it is practiced in the United States in general, and in California in particular, is so capricious as to be unconstitutional.

“When you’re talking about ending a man or a woman’s life, you’ve got to take arbitrariness out of it,” said Riverside County public defender Steve Harmon. “The death penalty never can take it out, so that’s another reason why we shouldn’t have it.”

Zavala’s crime “has no comparison to the nasty facts of the Harts case”, said Harmon, who opposes capital punishment on many grounds. “It’s a murder case, and that’s terrible, but that’s the arbitrariness of the death penalty.”

Harts and Morales had lived together for several years before she broke up with him and asked him to leave. Although none of her children were Harts’, he helped raise them in a tan two-storey house in a tired-looking subdivision in Moreno Valley. They called him Dad. He coached them at sports.

The night he murdered Morales in February 2011, Harts called and talked with each of the children. When he got to the youngest boy, seven-year-old Israel, he asked for a particular favor: leave the sliding glass door open.

“Tyrone told us he was bringing us a surprise,” the boy later testified.

Harts, then 39, borrowed a friend’s car, packed a gun and a container of lighter fluid, and broke into the darkened house when the family was soundly asleep. He made his way to the upstairs bedroom he once shared with Morales.

He attacked. She screamed. Kobe, 15, heard her cries from the downstairs bedroom where he and 13-year-old Isaiah slept. Kobe grabbed a kitchen knife and raced upstairs to help his mother. But when Harts fired a shot at the boy, he fled for a neighbor’s house, Isaiah in tow.

Morales broke free and headed for the stairs. Harts shot her. She crumpled on the landing. He doused her with accelerant and lit her on fire. That’s when the four youngest children emerged from their bedrooms. Elijah, 11 at the time, Destiny, then nine, Israel, seven, and Jasmine, six.

“The fire was big enough so they couldn’t get by their mom’s burning body without going single file,” supervising deputy district attorney Jared Haringsma said. “They had to go to the kitchen and get cups of water to put their mom’s burning body out and then wait for the police to arrive.”

Elijah called 911 but had trouble making the dispatcher understand. She asked him to put his mother on the phone. “My mom is the one that’s on fire,” he said.

The Justice That Works Act would replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole. Photograph: Reuters

Jurors found Harts guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder and five counts of felony child endangerment. They also agreed on the special circumstance of lying in wait, which made Harts eligible for execution. It took the jury less than a day to sentence him to death.

Riverside County jurors took about the same amount of time to convict Zavala of murder in the 2013 death of Sargeant, a high school sophomore. Because the crime was committed during a robbery, Zavala also was eligible for the death penalty.

But beyond the fact that both men had criminal records and were sentenced to die, their crimes were dramatically different.

Sargeant was walking along a busy street in East Hemet after school when he was accosted by three young men. Zavala demanded Sargeant hand over his cellphone. When the teenager did not, the three men began punching him.

Witnesses driving by testified that one of the men appeared to stab Sargeant, who later died at a local hospital.

Zavala’s accomplices were minors at the time of the crime and could not be sentenced to death, but Zavala was then 20.

“Zavala is not the worst of the worst,” Harmon said. “But to those 12 people sitting in the box, they’ve never been in the same room with a murderer before. So Zavala is the worst of the worst they’ve experienced. When given a chance, they say, well, this is the worst, so I’m going to stamp ‘death’ on this.”

Riverside County has been featured in multiple reports about how unevenly the death penalty is meted out. Death by Geography and The 2% Death Penalty: How a Minority of Counties Produce Most Death Cases at Enormous Costs to All were penned by outside groups looking in.

But perhaps the most damning analysis came from inside the county’s own court system. In a 2010 report, presiding judge Thomas H Cahraman rued “the pure volume of death penalty cases ... We now have more such cases than any other county in the state, including Los Angeles County.”

At the time, Riverside County had a population of 2.2 million, 45 death penalty cases and 11 more with special-circumstances allegations, which could draw a death sentence. Los Angeles County, with 9.8 million people, “has 43 DP cases”, Cahraman wrote.

Rod Pacheco was the district attorney at the time, and his successor sought the ultimate penalty in fewer cases. And when Mike Hestrin became district attorney in 2015, he shrunk the list of death-eligible cases even further.

But Hestrin is campaigning actively for Proposition 66 and said he would be “very disappointed” if the death penalty is repealed in November. Deciding to seek the death penalty is difficult and sobering but necessary, he said, because “there are those heinous cases where we need the option”.