February 23, 2009
Opinion: Death row futility
Thomas Francis Edwards died a week ago Saturday of natural causes at age 65. That may not sound strange until you consider that Edwards, the convicted killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl, had been on death row for 22 years.
That's right. Two decades later, the state of California still hadn't carried out a sentence imposed in the mid-1980s. And there's nothing unusual about that. Of the state's 680 death row inmates, 67 have been waiting to die for 25 years or more; nearly 300 have waited 15 years or more.
Today, a death row inmate is more likely to die of old age than to be put to death by the state. Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 43 have died of natural causes, five more of "other causes," 16 by suicide — and 14 have been executed, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation…
LINK - LATimes.com Opinion Story
