Column: Why death row doesn’t work and how Charles Manson changed the death penalty

Here’s that wacky California again. We just voted for more guns and ammo regulations, a plastic bag ban, legal marijuana, higher cigarette taxes – and in favor of hurrying up the death penalty? Seem quirky for a blue state? Not so much. Hadar Aviram is a law professor at UC Hastings. She volunteered for the Proposition 62 campaign to end the death penalty altogether in favor of life in prison without parole. That lost to Proposition 66, which pledges to speed up the death penalty in California, which hasn’t executed anyone in 10 years. The ACLU has already challenged 66 in court. Aviram is following her book “Cheap on Crime” with another on the Manson family’s parole hearings, and she thinks the promises of Proposition 66 are impossible to meet.

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