Editor’s note: This editorial was updated on May 20 to reflect developments.

The Democrats who control the California state government are in an ambitious mood of late.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Senate president Kevin de León spar over who will lead efforts to impose far stronger gun control laws. Newsom thinks the Golden State should allow the legalization of marijuana. Gov. Jerry Brown pursues fundamental reforms in how California punishes large categories of criminals. And Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, has started a national debate about guaranteeing that private sector workers get paid sick days, as California now requires.

But the time may have come for another important debate: Should California scrap the death penalty?


We hope to hear from state leaders, families of crime victims, law enforcement officials and the public. What do you think? Email us.

A good starting point for this debate is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s repeated denunciations of California’s version of the death penalty. Breyer and many other critics have noted that in the 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was constitutional, California has executed only 13 people, and none since 2006. But the state has 748 people on death row, with many having been sentenced decades ago. Long legal challenges, difficulties obtaining drugs for lethal injections and more have turned California’s death-penalty process into a complete morass.

Just this month, Breyer wrote that in his view this makes the death penalty erratic and unreliable — limbo justice so capricious as to be unconstitutional. He said this also destroys one of the most-cited rationales offered for the penalty: that it deters criminals by reminding them that they will pay the ultimate price for the most awful crimes.

So we have a California death penalty that essentially never is carried out — that arguably has no deterrent value — and which has as a main effect the emptying of the state treasury. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice has estimated that having a death row for condemned prisoners costs California more than 10 times as much as having these prisoners serving life imprisonment. A 2011 study put the total cost to the state since 1976 at $4 billion — more than $300 million per person executed.


In many ways it would be appropriate for the governor, a longtime opponent of capital punishment, to lead this debate. In 1986, voters removed three justices whom Brown had appointed to the California Supreme Court — Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin — for overturning dozens of seemingly legitimate death penalty sentences. So Brown knows the power of the death penalty as a political issue. But since 1986, California’s process has become more of a fiasco, not less of one.

Brown is going to get great credit as the governor who stabilized California after years of often ineffective leadership. If he is looking for a beefier policy legacy to go with his management legacy, leading the charge for a ballot initiative that scraps the death penalty might be the way to go.

Yet Californians have repeatedly shown strong support for the death penalty. Does that persist even now? We intend to find out.