"In California, Some Want To Be On Death Row; Life Is Better There"

The title of this post is the headline of this new NPR entry, which is itself a follow-up to this important new Los Angeles Times article discussing life on California's death row.  The full headline for the LATimes piece captures the major themes of today's must-read article: "Death penalty is considered a boon by some California inmates: Given the state moratorium on executions and an appeals process that can last for decades, inmates can expect to live a long time, and with privileges other prisoners lack." Here are excerpts from the article:

White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence.   It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all....

Though death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison are far from coddled, they live in single cells that are slightly larger than the two-bunk, maximum-security confines elsewhere, they have better access to telephones and they have "contact visits" in plexiglass booths by themselves rather than in communal halls as in other institutions.  They have about the only private accommodations in the state's 33-prison network, which is crammed with 160,000-plus convicts.

Death row prisoners are served breakfast and dinner in their cells, can usually mingle with others in the outdoor exercise yards while eating their sack lunches, and have exclusive control over the television, CD player or other diversions in their cells.   "Death row inmates probably have the most liberal telephone privileges of anyone in state custody," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, explaining that they need ready access to their attorneys and can often make calls from their cells over a phone that can be rolled along the cellblock.

The condemned wear the same jeans and chambray-shirt prison garb, eat the same food as prepared in other prisons and enjoy the same access to mail-order and canteen goods paid for by their families, as long as they maintain good behavior, Thornton said.

Those on death row are also allowed more personal property inside their cells, to accommodate their voluminous legal documents without infringing on the 6 cubic feet of snacks and entertainment devices allowed each prisoner, said Lt. Sam Robinson, spokesman for San Quentin.  "It's not that he thinks conditions will be better; they are better," Johnson's attorney, Michael Molfetta, said of his client's request for death row. Johnson, 46, figures that he will be close to 70 by the time his appeals are exhausted, Molfetta said, "and he says he doesn't care to live beyond that."

Students who take my sentencing classes have long heard me say that I would rather be sentenced to death than to life without parole were I to be convicted of a death-eligible crime.  I often make this point when talking about wrongful convictions when suggesting that a wrongfully convicted person sentenced to death likely is likely better able to get media and the public interested in his case than a wrongfully convicted person sentenced to LWOP.  (The on-going debate in Texas as to whether Cameron Todd Willingham was wrongfully convicted seems to confirm this point.)  But this LA Times piece rightly spotlights why even the guilty might prefer a death sentence to an LWOP sentence.

And there are other benefits to death row for the guilty that are not discussed in this piece.  For example, many persons on death row are uniquely able to garner pen pals and other abolitionist supporters from European countries and also are uniquely able to garner press attention (as this LA Times article itself shows).  Put another way, a murderer condemned to death is always going to be more of a celebrity and will have a higher Q-rating than a murderer given an LWOP sentence.

Of course, some guilty murderer still surely will prefer a lower-profile LWOP fate than the higher-profile experience that comes with a death sentence.  Nevertheless, the real-world punishment dynamics discussed here are among the reasons I view LWOP sentences as generally more problematic (and, in turn, generally more "cruel and unusual" for purposes of the Eighth Amendment) than death sentences.