White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County California jury that convicted him of first-degree murder in October 2009: a death sentence.
It wasn’t remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all.
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Huntington Beach, California Police Department detectives are trying to identify women, girls, boys and toddlers who appear in hundreds of photos seized from a storage locker in Seattle, Washington, that was rented by convicted serial killer and Dating Game winner Rodney Alcala. Alcala, age 66, was sentenced to death on Monday, March 30, 2010 for killing five people.
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The Los Angeles Times reports that since 1977 the actual number of executions in California prisons is 13. What are the chances that Alcala or Johnson will be executed? It is unlikely. California has the nation’s largest death row population, with 685 sentenced to die by lethal injection. Five times as many death row inmates — 71 — have died over that same period of natural causes, suicide or inside prison violence.
The reason the death penalty has failed to reduce murder is obvious. The State of California rarely actually does conduct executions.
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