June 8th 2009
California’s Latest Budget Victim: The Dealth Penalty
Q
uite a lot has been written about California’s budget debacle - a $24 billion, growing hole - and its impact on the poor, state employees, our highways and waterways, and the viability of our counties and municipalities (who fear Sacramento will be stealing their surpluses).
But there may be good news in the budget melt-down … if you’re planning on committing a capital crime any time soon. From Steve Greenhut’s column in yesterday’s OC Register:
During a recent budget meeting, [OC District Attorney Tony] Rackauckas was grilled by [OC Supervisor John] Moorlach’s chief of staff, Mario Mainero, over the cost-effectiveness of pursuing the death penalty in so many cases, even though that penalty is virtually never actually imposed in this state. Mainero believes that the D.A.’s office spends unnecessarily on death-penalty prosecutions, a contention certainly up for debate, but at least we are now having important debates about how departments spend their money.
It seems hard to believe that matters of such import would hinge on the number of bucks in the coffer, but then, everything about California nowadays seems a bit hard to believe … unless you factor in the fact that the Dems have complete control of Sacramento.
Earlier Tuesday the US Supreme Court rejected Cooey’s last-ditch appeal arguing that due to his obesity and the medicine he was taking, his execution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, which is unconstitutional. …
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”