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Perspective

Mar. 29, 2012

California's death penalty is beyond repair

Efforts to fix California's death penalty are futile. By Andrew Love


Justice Harry Blackmun famously, if belatedly, came to the conclusion that despite the efforts of the states and the courts to "devise legal formulas and procedural rules" to achieve fairness and consistency to the death penalty, it remained hopelessly "fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination ... and mistake." He concluded, therefore, in a 1994 dissent that "from this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

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