As California moves to speed up executions, a man is exonerated after 25 years on death row

[DonViejo]

By Radley Balko April 30 at 2:02 PM

This Los Angeles Times editorial lays out the brutal details of yet another death-row exoneration:

A Kern County Superior Court judge last week ordered that a 68-year-old former farmworker, Vicente Benavides Figueroa, be released from San Quentin’s death row after the local district attorney declared she would not retry him. Benavides had been in prison for more than 25 years after being convicted of raping, sodomizing and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter.

-snip-

Benavides was freed after all but one of the medical experts who testified against him recanted their conclusions that the girl had, in effect, been raped to death — conclusions they had reached after reviewing incomplete medical records. In fact, the first nurses and doctors who examined the semiconscious and battered girl in 1991 observed no injuries suggesting she had been raped or sodomized, but those details were not passed along to the medical expert witnesses who testified in court. Injuries later observed at two other hospitals were likely caused by that first effort to save her life, which included attempts to insert an adult-sized catheter.

Two points to add some context to this unimaginably horrific story:

First, Kern County, home to Bakersfield, was also the terrain of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, one of the pillars of the law-and-order movement of the 1980s and 1990s. There was a joke that Bakersfield’s unofficial motto was “Come for vacation, leave on probation.” Jagels used to brag on his official Web page of having a higher per-capita imprisonment rate than any county in California. He was elected head of the state’s district attorneys association multiple times and was often referred to as the dean of California prosecutors. He also led the charge for nearly every draconian crime bill the state passed in that era, including the state’s notorious “three strikes” law. He helped get three anti-death-penalty justices removed from the California Supreme Court and lobbied heavily against medical marijuana.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/04/30/as-california-moves-to-speed-up-executions-a-man-is-exonerated-after-25-years-on-death-row/

[NewJeffCT]

1. Shouldn't California be stopping, or slowing down executions?

not speeding them up?

[haele]

2. Sigh - Propositions were passed to speed it up. To "save money" and reduce the prison population.

Since we couldn't manage to narrowly pass a proposition to get rid of the death penalty, we got to vote on a proposition that sped the process up in the same year. Thanks, red counties...

One of the things the state is constantly being criticized for is our prison overpopulation. Which stems directly from the "War on Drugs" - back in the 80's and '90's, we were filling prisons up with people charged with drug felonies that were let out five to ten years later, which meant we had a lot of basically unemployable men who were still in their prime on the streets trying to survive and care for family members.
Recidivism goes up, because very little is left for them to do other than sketchy "pay in cash" jobs and minimum wage pity hires. The gangs are always willing to recruit disposable mules and dealers, especially since many of the gang members in prison would tell their cohorts outside "hey, found a guy who can be trusted, and he's getting out next week...".
If these felons didn't join a gang in prison, they would be more likely to join a gang when they were out, because there is a form of protection and support in a gang - especially for minorities. And a good two thirds of the time, if not more - they'll return to prison for a parole violation or some other problem that gets them hit with a "Three Strikes" sentence.

Just because once you send someone to prison, you've basically derailed his or her future. And even though some very strong, even tempered people can get past prison and "improve themselves" - the average modern person doesn't have the willpower or self-confidence to do so.

Once they fail, they're disposable to the U.S. society. Like rats in an overpopulated maze, we don't really believe in second chances here and will eat our own just to clear a space for ourselves.

Haele