After botched Tennessee execution, what Californians should know
Abotched execution in Tennesseeis putting a renewed spotlight on California's death penalty debate, including a state moratorium that could be revisited by the governor elected next year.
California has
not carried out an execution since 2006, even though it houses the nation's largest death row population. Executions have been on hold since Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019, but the policy's future could depend on his successor.
The renewed attention follows the Sept. 30 execution attempt of convicted killer Christa Pike in Tennessee. Pike remained alive after receiving lethal injection drugs, according to court filings by her attorneys, prompting an emergency halt to the procedure and an investigation ordered by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
As questions mount about what went wrong in Tennessee, here's a look at where California stands on capital punishment, the state's execution history and what the next governor could mean for the future of the death penalty.
California and the death penalty
A year after California officially became the nation's 31st state, it authorized capital punishment, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. At the time, executions were carried out by county sheriffs.
Over time, however, the state transitioned to executions at state prisons and moved from hanging to the gas chamber, then later lethal injection, the CDCR says. The death penalty has faced major legal and voter actions that have led to periods in the Golden State when capital punishment was halted and later reinstated.
California reinstated its current death penalty statute when voters overwhelmingly approved 1978's Proposition 7, according to the CDCR. Since then, California has carried out 13 executions, a small fraction of the 602 executions carried out in Texas, the nation's leading state for executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Voters weigh in on death penalty, then comes governor moratorium
In November 2016, California voters voted against Proposition 62, which sought to abolish the death penalty. Instead, voters approved Proposition 66, which was meant to speed up the execution process.
However, shortly after taking office in 2019, Newsom signed an executive order establishing a moratorium on the death penalty.
“The intentional killing of another person is wrong, and as Governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom said in a March 2019 statement. “Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Most of all, the death penalty is absolute. It’s irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.”
Where do gubernatorial candidates stand on death penalty moratorium
The state's next governor will decide whether to extend Newsom's death penalty moratorium.
Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra has said Newsom's moratorium "represented an important step toward a more just criminal justice system."
"As Governor, I will extend California’s moratorium on executions and continue moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong," he wrote in a May post on X.
This is a shift from Becerra's tenure as California's attorney general "when his office defended capital convictions and pursued new death sentences," according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
"While in office, AG Becerra said he considered capital punishment as a legitimate option for crime victims, and during his 2017 confirmation hearing, he told state lawmakers he supported the death penalty in principle even as he criticized how it was carried out in practice," the nonprofit said.
Meanwhile, Republican candidate Steve Hilton said that although he's personally against the death penalty, he would not extend the moratorium when voters previously showed favor for the death penalty, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.
“I don’t think it’s OK for a governor to just substitute their personal opinion on an issue where the voters had an explicit and direct say,” he told the newspaper.
Has California had any botched executions?
California has not had a botched execution in recent history, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center.
The state has used multiple execution methods throughout its history, including hanging, the gas chamber and, most recently, lethal injection
There have been 75 botched lethal injections out of 1,054 attempts across the nation since the method was first used in December 1982 to 2010, according to the nonprofit. With a 7.2% failure rate, lethal injection has the highest failure rate of any execution method.
When was California's most recent execution?
The most recent execution in California was in 2006, when the state put Clarence Ray Allen, 76, to death by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison, according to the CDCR. Allen was sentenced to death in 1982 after he was convicted of orchestrating a 1980 triple murder when he was already serving a life sentence inside Folsom Prison.
How many inmates are on death row in California?
California currently has 564 inmates (546 men and 18 women) awaiting execution, CDCR records show.
The Golden State has the largest death row population of any state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Notable inmates on California death row
Some of the notable inmates on California's death row include:
Richard Allen Davis, 72,was sentenced to death after being convicted in 1996 in the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, which "received nationwide media attention and led to increased penalties for repeat offenders under the Three Strikes Law," according to the Sonoma County District Attorney. Charles Ng, 65, is a convicted serial killer who is accused, alongside an accomplice, of torturing, raping and murdering 11 victims in Northern California in the 1980s, according to the Associated Press. He was sentenced to death in 1999. Cary Stayner, 65, known as the Yosemite killer, was sentenced to death after he was convicted in the murders of four women near Yosemite National Park in 1999, according to Courthouse News Service. Randy Kraft, 81, known as the "Scorecard Killer," was convicted of 16 murders and sentenced to death in 1989, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Kraft is believed to be responsible for more than 60 murders, according to investigators.
Reporting from USA TODAY NETWORK's Amanda Lee Myers and Kirsten Fiscus contributed to this report.