The $100 mil fund for law enforcement over the next three years? Drop in the bucket, my friend. That's @ $30 mil a year to support ALL local law enforcement agencies, sheriffs, and district attorneys in the entire state. The largest local law enforcement agency in CA, the LAPD, has an annual budget of $1.189bil. Do the math and that $30mil represents only 3% of their budget, so imagine how much the hundreds of local law enforcement agencies throughout the state would receive each year from this fund. And sure, they can renew it after three years, but they also might not. Either way it will not make much of a difference. The goal is to abolish the death penalty. Call it bait and switch or whatever you want. They know what they're doing.

As for placing future generations in harms way as a reason to vote against Prop 34, think of the big picture. You may have heard the saying, "When California sneezes, the rest of the country catches a cold"? Passage of Prop 34 will influence other states to do the same. Commuting death sentences to LWOP is quite possibly a method to slowly chip away at our state's harsh sentencing laws. If Prop 34 passes, we may have a ballot initiative to eliminate LWOP one day. That could not happen if the death penalty was still in place. In 2005 the US Supreme Court determined that sentencing juveniles to death was unconstitutional. It's now 2012 and they determined that sentencing juveniles to LWOP is also unconstitutional. That's how it works. It's a process. You may be resigned to your fate, but the death penalty needs to be eliminated in order to change the conversation about how we administer criminal justice policies in CA, because, by its very nature, the death penalty is front and center as a symbol of our reputation as a tough on crime state. It must be repealed to not only make a bold statement that taxpayers are sick of paying for a broken system of punishment with no returns, but will also clear the path towards more criminal justice reforms that are safe, effective and fair.

I know that if it does pass, it will diminish the appeals process that the condemned are constitutionally required to have that LWOPs don't. But given that the appeals process is decades long because we have failed to adequately fund all that a person sentenced to death is required by law to receive once sentenced to death, you are more likely to die of old age or natural causes than by the needle. Everyone on death row is. Since the CA death penalty was reinstated in 1977 there have been 80k murders committed and only 13 executions carried out, meaning people who commit murder are three times more likely to get struck by lightning than executed for their crime. But as I was saying…the state has failed to provide the funds necessary to appoint competent counsel right away in order to represent inmates on their automatic appeals and state habeas corpus proceedings. Even when counsel is appointed, you'll find that the state has not sufficiently funded counsel to conduct investigations into inmate's claims of State and Federal constitution violations. Etcetera. I am preaching to the choir. Don't think for a second given how broke our state is that our representatives will agree to put forth an unfathomable amount of money required to sufficiently fund the appeals process for the largest death row population in the country. They are actually looking into speeding it up by eliminating certain elements of it, or, to use your word, diminish it.

I have to stop. Death row inmates that are pro-death penalty. I am going to shake this off and get back to work. In the mean time, acknowledge you are a shill for the real people that stand to benefit from preserving capital punishment, one of them being the random local law enforcement blog I came across that referred me to this piece and thanked you for speaking out against Prop 34. Unbelievable.