Feb. 26


	CALIFORNIA:

	County supports death penalty ban -- after dramatic testimony, split board 
asks the state to study issue 

	After an emotional hearing in which a former district attorney testified 
he prosecuted and then later won release for a wrongly convicted man, the 
Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to support a death 
penalty moratorium. 
	The current county District Attorney Tom Orloff presented the other side. 
He showed smiling faces of child murder victims, but it wasn't enough to 
deter the board from supporting the ban. 
	The public defender, religious leaders, Democratic Party activists, death 
penalty opponents and two wrongly convicted men urged the board to 
endorse the moratorium so the state could study how it's carried out. 
	Supervisors Nate Miley, Keith Carson and Alice Lai-Bitker voted for the 
moratorium, while a sobbing board President Gail Steele abstained and 
Supervisor Scott Haggerty voted no. 
	Miley brought forward the ban at the behest of a 19-member coalition of 
county Democratic clubs. 
	Alameda County now joins other cities and counties asking Gov. Gray Davis 
to impose the ban, including San Francisco, Marin and Santa Clara 
counties and the cities of Menlo Park, Oakland, Berkeley, Santa Monica, 
Santa Cruz, East Palo Alto, Sebastopol, Portola Valley and West 
Hollywood. 
	The hearing in a packed supervisors' chambers started off dramatically, 
with former county District Attorney John Taylor urging the board to 
enact the resolution. Standing next to him was Aaron Owens, 59, of 
Berkeley, who he prosecuted for a double murder Owens didn't commit. 
	"Now he's alive, and I thank God," Taylor said. "He was found to be 
innocent and exonerated after 10 years." 
	When Owens was convicted in 1973, the death penalty wasn't allowed in the 
state because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional. If 
the death penalty had been available and Owens had been sentenced to die, 
Taylor said Owens might have been wrongly executed because all his 
appeals had been exhausted three years later -- years before a 
co-defendant finally admitted that Owens hadn't committed the crime. 
	Public Defender Diane Bellas told the board that costs associated with 
defending death-penalty cases are high, and although the state has 
created a system for recovering them, the county has not received any 
reimbursements for more than a decade. 
	And, she said, "No one should be comforted that California is not 
Illinois. We may be better, more careful, but we are not perfect." 
	Bellas was referring to a decision in January by Illinois Gov. George 
Ryan to commute the sentences of all death row inmates after receiving a 
study saying criminal procedures needed to be improved to minimize the 
chance of executing innocent people. 
	Gary Sirbu, an Oakland attorney who appeared on behalf of the Alameda 
County chapter of the Californians for a Moratorium on Executions and the 
county Democratic Clubs Moratorium Alliance, said 14,000 county residents 
signed petitions supporting the moratorium. 
	He told the board the ban "does not urge you to abolish the death 
penalty," but only that it be thoroughly examined. 
	But death-penalty supporters loudly applauded following District Attorney 
Orloff's dramatic presentation. 
	"The moratorium is really a ruse by people opposed to the death penalty," 
Orloff said. 
	He said 72 % of people in the state support the death penalty, and he 
urged the board to vote against a moratorium that "unjustly condemns our 
criminal justice system." 
	After the hearing, Orloff said he didn't believe further review of the 
death penalty is necessary because "it's been studied to death." 
	He said the criminal justice system in the state already has many 
built-in protections to prevent executions of innocent people. He said 
only 10 executions have been carried out since 1977, and it takes an 
average of 17 years for a case to wend its way through the system. 
	On the other hand, Sirbu argued that 2/3 of the state's death-penalty 
convictions are reversed by state and federal appeals courts.
	Board President Steele, who was crying as she addressed the crowd, said 
she was abstaining because she doesn't want to take positions on issues 
not directly related to county business and because she can't forgive 
people who sexually abuse and kill babies. 
	She said 190 Alameda County children under the age of 18 have died at the 
hands of violence since 1994. She holds memorial ceremonies for these 
victims twice a year. 
	Miley said he believes it's important to study the issue when "people are 
asking and begging for some deliberative process," adding that 115,000 
people in the state have signed petitions seeking the moratorium. 
	Haggerty said the murder convictions of the two speakers that were 
overturned weighed heavily on him, but he still couldn't forget men who 
"can rape a 4-year-old girl because they have the genitalia.... As long 
as we have people who believe they can take the law in their own hands 
and kill people, I won't support it." 
	Carson said he has always opposed the death penalty, saying the criminal 
justice system is "not 100 percent foolproof." 
	"Death is final," he added. "If you discover the evidence is wrong, 
there's no way to bring the individual back." 
	Lai-Bitker said she supported the ban because "I just don't want to see 
innocent people die." 
	Since the Alameda County board's position wasn't unanimous, none of the 
resolution's supporting statements were adopted. Instead, the board 
merely went on record as supporting the moratorium so the fairness of the 
death penalty can be studied.

(source: The Argus)