Contact: Michael Rushford
(916) 446-0345
History and Structure of Commission Raise Grave Doubts of Its Fairness
In 2004, then-Senate President Pro-Tem John Burton created the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. That commission will release a report on the death penalty today at 1:00 p.m. However, the circumstances of this commission’s creation, the structure of its leadership, and its proceedings to date have raised grave doubts as to whether the commission itself can and will be fair.
Commissions are normally created by legislation passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the Governor. This commission was created unilaterally by Senate resolution. This unilateral action enabled Senator Burton, a fierce opponent of capital punishment, to create a commission to his liking without compromising with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a death penalty supporter.
The commission chairman is John Van de Kamp, and the vice-chairman is John Streeter. Both are opponents of capital punishment.
The commission chose as its executive director Gerald Uelmen, a long-time, partisan advocate of the anti-death-penalty side of the debate. This highly partisan choice further deepened suspicions about the commission on the part of prosecutors and victims’ advocates.
The commission states that it has funded independent research regarding the operation of the death penalty. Only one of those contracts went to a research organization that can be considered neutral, the Rand Corporation, and that study was inconclusive. All of the other contracts went to academics with a distinctly anti-death-penalty perspective. None went to death-penalty supporters. There is no indication that the commission had the work peer-reviewed, the most basic qualification for research fit for publication.
“We hope that the commission will produce a balanced and thoughtful examination of the death penalty in California and not the recitation of defense-side talking points that we have seen in so many other states,” said Kent Scheidegger, Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. “Regrettably, the actions of the commission to date do not inspire confidence that it will.”