With nationwide progress on the abolition of the death penalty, and with California’s clear lead on a host of progressive issues, one would have expected that California’s Proposition 62 to abolish the death penalty in 2016 would have sailed through. And yet, for the second time in a decade, California voters rejected such a proposition, voting to keep the death penalty in place even as they voted Democratic by the largest numbers in 80 years and approved other progressive measures like the legalization of marijuana.
California’s sharp contrast to the seven other states that have abolished capital punishment in the last two decades has left many wondering why California’s movement fell short. Ultimately, however, it was the combination of a highly funded opposition campaign appealing to the electorate’s fears and a competing ballot measure, Proposition 66, that led to Proposition 62’s collapse.
Given the the strong focus on terrorism throughout the 2016 election season, opponents of repealing the death penalty could successfully appeal to fear. The December 2015 San Bernardino shooting, where 14 people died and 22 were seriously injured, created qualms about security during the election season. Other attacks outside of the state, like the Orlando nightclub shooting, likely had the same impact. As Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA law professor explained in an interview with The New York Times, “When people are scared, that fear can manifest as a punitive impulse”. The fear caused by these tragedies discouraged voters from reducing the standard of punishment for similar crimes.
With these horrific acts in the electorate’s minds, the opposition campaign acted quickly, outraising the other side 12 million to 10 million and using the money to unleash emotionally charged ads. In one such ad, a mother, Sandra Friend, tells a story about how her little boy, shown in a photograph, was murdered by a convict released from prison and how she is “living a parent’s worst nightmare.” The ad ends with a call to “Mend, Don’t End, California’s Death Penalty,” effectively inciting fear in order to direct support away from the capital punishment abolition movement.
The other death penalty-related proposition, Proposition 66, then became the movement around which fearful Californians could rally. As alluded to in the above ad, Proposition 66 called for streamlining the death penalty to make the appeals process faster. The proposition therefore offered, as Mike Ferrell, the president of Death Penalty Focus and leader of the Yes on 62 campaign, explained to the HPR, “an antidote to one of the things we were talking about, which was the horrific waste involved in the system, both in terms of time and money.” Stripped of their economic arguments against the death penalty, supporters of Proposition 62 had to resort to other non-cost related points, such as the potential for innocent people to be executed. But when voters had the opportunity to reform the death penalty, they chose to do that rather than to abolish it; Proposition 66 narrowly passed.
Ultimately, the failure of Proposition 62 is a definite step backward for the abolition movement. Still, it is clear that public opinion is gradually swinging away from the death penalty. While 80 percent of Americans supported the death penalty for “those convicted of murder” in 1994, only 56 percent of Americans felt this way by 2015. And while 71 percent of Democrats supported it in 1994, only 40 percent did by 2015. With this major drop in support among Democrats, it is only a matter of time before national leaders within the party start to take stands against capital punishment, and state initiatives like Proposition 62 make it past the finish line.
Image Credit: Flickr/Patrick Feller