The California State Senate established a commission to study flaws in the criminal justice system and death penalty in this state. This study by certain experts is supposed to begin this year, and stop at the end of 2007.
This bill was passed in August 2004 not long after a January 2003 report by the Santa Clara Law Review identified more than eighty flaws within the California death penalty system.
In October 2004 a delegation of 450 attorneys urged a moratorium on the death penalty in California. The conference of delegates of the California Bar Associations, representing criminal defenders and civil attorneys from dozens of bar groups, said that "executions should be put on hold pending an inquiry into whether California administers capital punishment fairly and uniformly."
This group of educated people, as well as groups of concerned people across this state, want a three-year moratorium on all executions-which could eventually become permanent. The proposal would create an independent investigative committee focusing on race, the reliability of convictions, and whether the poor people sent to death row had adequate representation. This group also wants an inquiry into the financial cost of capital punishment and whether or not it is imposed too often.
Despite all of these things going on within this state at the present time, the legal murderers that impose and carry out the death penalty within this state refuse to take a timeout, or issue a moratorium on the death penalty until these studies are completed! So now another poor person is set to be murdered by these arrogant people even though everyone knows that this system is broken!
Donald Beardslee, a poor human being with confirmed brain damage, is to be murdered at one minute after midnight, January 19th, 2005. This human being should not be murdered by this state under any circumstances, but especially when so many flaws of this system are coming to the forefront. This in and of itself says so much about the state and the people who work for it who want to win at any and all cost.
In Struggle
From Death Row,
Kevin Cooper
January, 2005