Summary
Sitting on a couch at his home in this remote farm town last week, Charles Erbert thumbed through a well-worn Bible to find the passage that captures his perspective on the most emotionally charged issue on November’s ballot: California’s death penalty.
“Scripture tells us not to kill, but it also tells us that he who strikes a man and kills him shall surely be put to death,” said Erbert, 65, whose pregnant wife and their unborn child were brutally slain in one of the Bay Area’s most gruesome crimes.
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“A well-working system would bring justice, however you define it, much sooner,” said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford Law School professor who co-directs the university’s Criminal Justice Center.
Proponents of Proposition 66 — many of them police officers, prison guards and district attorneys — identify the “endless, frivolous appeals” sought by the condemned as the source of the problem. Weisberg, however, says the complexity of the law, coupled with too little funding for public defenders, is to blame.
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