California Supreme Court justice blasts death penalty system
SAN FRANCISCO -- The death penalty system in the nation's most populous state is dysfunctional and expensive, and a ballot measure approved by voters to speed up executions will not make it "workable," a California Supreme Court justice said Thursday in an unusual opinion.
Associate Justice Goodwin Liu made the comments after joining the rest of the court to unanimously uphold the death sentence of Thomas Potts, who was convicted of killing an elderly couple in 1997.
But Liu wrote separately to express his concerns about the state of the death penalty system in California and Proposition 66, a 2016 ballot measure that aimed to remove regulatory hurdles to executions.
The measure, however, did not enact the "key reforms that leading authorities consider fundamental to a workable death penalty system," Liu wrote in the opinion, which Associate Justice Mariano Florentino-Cuellar joined. Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown appointed both justices.
Read more: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article228536039.html
