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In other words, give us whoever ya got.
"We have some very competent attorneys out there," Ramos says. "There are more than enough component attorneys that can handle these cases."
While it seems there are more California lawyers than palm trees, there are fewer "competent" lawyers — in terms of death penalty law, at least — than there are Kardashians.
"Stripping qualifications runs smack into the requirement that you have the right to not just a lawyer, but a competent lawyer," Semel says.
Know a real estate or personal injury lawyer? Now picture them arguing a death penalty case and you may begin to see the issue with expanding the pool. (Not to mention the cost from the inevitable appeals that'll come out of those botched defenses will only throw more cases onto the docket, which is not exactly a path to savings.)
Even if an army of qualified lawyers landed on California's beaches, hankering for some sweet death penalty work, it still wouldn't necessarily speed up the process, because another piece of business that needs resolution is how we execute.
Because, right now, the state has no legal way to do it.
The main reason that Michael Morales' execution was kiboshed in 2006 was that two court-appointed anesthesiologists — there to oversee the procedure and ensure Morales did not wake up or suffer extreme pain during the fatal dosing — refused to participate, citing ethical reasons. No other medical professional would step in, for the same reason.
With nobody to oversee an execution as mandated by the courts, no one's been executed in the state since.
California's lethal injection cocktail consisted of sodium thiopental, a quick-acting general anesthetic known as "truth serum" that knocks people out in spy flicks; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that stops respiratory muscles; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Everything is supposed to happen quickly and relatively painlessly, but witnesses have described executions as ghastly scenes, full of gagging, thrashing, and screams from the dying that their bodies are on fire.
Hence, bids to tweak the cocktail. But every proposed change falls under the jurisdiction of the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which forces the proposal to a public hearing where anyone can comment.
But — here's the catch — if every comment logged during the hearing isn't responded to, the protocol change automatically fails.
"It's a tool to block the use of a single-drug protocol," Ramos says. "The last time this came up, there were over 7,000 comments, from a majority of people who don't even live in California, a lot from the ACLU. We missed seven responses and that terminated the hearing."
Part of the initiative will "solve" this by allowing "[n]o licensing board, department, commission, or accreditation agency" to oversee the executions.
The counter to this idea is the fact that between 1982 and 2010, the error rate for lethal injections in America was 7.1 percent. That is, seven of 100 lethal injection executions went wrong. And they do: Raymond Landry's 1988 execution was preceded by a syringe popping out and spraying the cocktail at the witnesses. Medics in 2009 gave up trying to find suitable veins in Romell Broom after two excruciating hours, and he remains on death row today. Maybe changes to these drug protocols should be overseen.
"Unmasking the process allows us to see why injections go wrong," Semel says. "Which drugs were used, are the personnel carrying out the executions qualified, are the drugs expired? That [kind of] secrecy allows governments to hide their mistakes and missteps."
But the current proposal's biggest deception may be that, even if it can do what it says — which, thanks to the courts, and thanks to the legal system, it can't — it still won't save the state money.
None of the improvements — the additional lawyers taking on these cases, the bailiffs, and court reporters burning the midnight oil to plow through a decade's worth of appeals -— are free.
"The irony is that it will not save a penny, but cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars," Semel says."The changes cannot be made without the infusion of enormous sums of money."
"That's a legitimate argument," Ramos admits. "[The costs] may increase several millions of dollars at the beginning when you hire more attorneys. But you're going to save tens of millions of dollars."
There's still a dissonance. Combing through the initiative's 16 pages is like looking through the first draft of an undergraduate paper. The wording is vague, unfocused, and feels tossed off. Yet money from a coalition of district attorneys, law enforcement, and victims' families is being spent to gather enough signatures so this rushes onto the ballot.
Why the race to put California back in the death business?
"When I read how muddled it was, how impossible some of its key features are, it's anyone's guess why they're doing it," says Paula Mitchell, executive director of the Project for the Innocent at Loyola Law School. "Other than to defeat the repeal measure."
About that repeal measure. It's called the Justice That Works Act of 2016, and if passed, it, too, would end the death penalty in California.
Once again, the repeal argument leaves the heartstrings alone and instead tugs on wallets. It solves the "dysfunctional" death penalty system with two quick fixes: Raise the percentage of prison wages that can be garnished toward victim restitution from 50 to 60 percent, and commute death penalty sentences to life without parole. And it, too, claims to save taxpayers an estimated $150 million a year.
Although Prop. 34, the last attempt to end the death penalty, was defeated in 2012, anti-death penalty advocates feel good about their shot this year. A recent Field Poll shows support for repeal rising from 40 percent, in September of 2014, to 47 percent earlier this year. Meanwhile, those who want to "speed up the execution process" dropped from 52 percent to 48 percent in the same time frame. That shift, along with a presidential election bringing in more voters, was enough to get the repeal coalition Taxpayers for Sentencing Reform to throw its initiative into the ring.
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