Enlarging the death penalty would not make our streets more safe. We should be asking some hard questions. Enlarging the death penalty would not enable us to spend our public safety tax dollars more wisely. The quality of justice would not be improved by this proposition. Adjusting the scope of punishment can never compensate for the harm caused by murder.
Any murder is deplorable.
In fact, it trivializes the vast majority of cases to imagine there is any link between the circumstances of a killing, the type of retribution imposed, and the agony of friends and family of the victim. There is no evidence that communities and families of murder victims in California are better able to recover from their loss due to the existence of a death penalty than communities and families in Massachusetts heal in the absence of a death penalty. Enlarging the death penalty would not improve justice for communities and families of victims. The law already allows capital punishment in more homicide cases than prosecutors pursue as death penalty matters. And in cases where they do urge a death sentence, jurors often refuse to recommend it.