P.O. Box 11622
Oakland, CA
94611
| Moratorium Motion Carries in Charged, Emotional Supervisors’ Hearing |
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By Karen Friedman & Gary Sirbu
On Tuesday, February 25th, 2004, a stark debate unfolded on Supervisor Nate Miley’s motion to support a moratorium on executions. The speakers on each side squared off before a large audience in the Alameda County Board of Supervisors chambers in Oakland.
(Go here for photos of the board meeting.)
MGO E-Board member Gary Sirbu opened on behalf of the Democratic Club Moratorium Alliance (DCMA) and Californians for a Moratorium on Executions (CME). He told the supervisors that this issue had come to them as a result of grassroots efforts of a number of Alameda County Democratic clubs. These clubs, acting in unison, were City of Alameda, Alameda County Democratic Lawyers, Berkeley, East Oakland, John George, MGO, Greater Hayward, and Hayward Demos. Additionally, he presented a list of 14,000 Alameda County residents who had signed CME’s petitions supporting a moratorium.
Then came John Taylor and Aaron Owens. Taylor, a former Alameda County Deputy District Attorney, told the Board that based on eyewitness testimony he had convicted Owens of two counts of first-degree murder, only to years later re-investigate the case and learn that Owens was innocent. He stood there with his arm around Owens and told the Board that, but for the short window period in which capital punishment was prohibited, he would have sought the death penalty and Aaron Owens would be dead. He thanked God that had not happened and told the supervisors that capital punishment was a human system and could not be free of human error.
Many others followed. Shujaa Graham said that after appellate court reversals and many years on California’s death row, a jury finally acquitted him.
A Catholic nun from the Dominican Order said that, contrary to its current belief, Catholicism condoned capital punishment at a time when societies did not have the resources to incarcerate for life. Three OCC clergy—a rabbi and two Protestant ministers—implored the Board to support a moratorium.
Public Defender Diane Bellas informed the Supervisors that capital cases were many times longer and far more complicated than non-capital ones and taxed the resources of her office and the county. Assistant Public Defender Ralph Crofton, an MGO member, told the Board that the Oakland Police Department does not videotape the questioning of murder suspects, nor does it audiotape them until after they have already confessed or given admissions, often after many hours of questioning. He spoke of the danger of extracting secret confessions that could be involuntary and therefore unreliable.
Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff attended with his two senior capital case prosecutors. One of them, Angela Backers, made a power point presentation on the multi-layered post-conviction judicial review available to death row inmates. Orloff then projected color photographs of the smiling faces of children who were later murdered and described the viciousness of some of the slayings. He said that only a single death row inmate had availed himself of DNA testing, and the results confirmed his guilt.
Allowed less than a minute to respond, Sirbu told the Board that two-thirds of California’s capital convictions are overturned by state or federal reviewing courts and that the vastly expensive capital punishment system was not reliable. He argued that anyone who did not believe that some of the 618 inmates on death row were innocent was living in a fantasyland.
Then it was the Board’s turn. Supervisors Miley and Carson voiced many concerns about the administration of California’s death penalty laws and expressed their support for a moratorium. Supervisor Haggerty alluded to a San Diego rape/murder of a young girl and angrily stated that he would vote against the motion. Board president Gail Steele, crying, stated she was torn between two conflicting forces: on the one hand she had heard the clergy speak against killing, but on the other she could not forgive those who kill children. She also did not believe the Board should be addressing statewide issues. For these reasons she announced her abstention.
Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker spoke last. She softly announced that she was persuaded that innocent people could be executed under the current system and that she supported a moratorium to reexamine it.
The motion passed three to one with one abstention, an anticipated outcome. Nevertheless, we did not expect this two-year effort to end in such a heart wrenching and exhausting fashion.