This past March the ACLU of Northern California released a new report on the state of the death penalty in the United States. The report, titled Death In Decline ’09, found that the number of death sentences handed down in 2009 reached “the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.”

            While the news may have been encouraging to death penalty opponents, Texas proponents of the death penalty were not pleased because they lost “bragging rights” as the “death penalty capital” of the United States. Texas was unceremoniously usurped of its title by California who sent more people to death row in 2009 than it had in the previous seven years. With 694 inmates on its death row as of October 1, 2009, California already by far led the nation with the number of condemned inmates awaiting execution. But Texan death penalty supporters shouldn’t be too upset. They actually kill people here. The last person executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen who was put to death on January 17, 2006. Since that time Texas has executed 104 people.

            Los Angeles County, along with Orange and Riverside counties, became known as the “killer counties” because they accounted for 83 percent of all of California’s 2009 death sentences, even though they represent only 41 percent of the state’s population. On its way to becoming the number one death penalty county in America—replacing Texas’ Harris County for that dubious distinction—Los Angeles County sent more people to death row in 2009 than the entire State of Texas for the same period.

            The largest demographic to suffer the increased application of the death penalty in California were Hispanics. “We don’t know what is driving this increase in the number of Latinos sentenced to death,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. “Unfortunately the state does not collect the data needed to answer this important question. What we do know is that all California communities would be better served if California opted for permanent imprisonment as a safe and cost-effective alternative to the death penalty.”

            I would suspect the escalating drug cartel violence in Mexico over the past several years and the parallel intensified debate about illegal immigration in this country, especially those shouting above the den that the Mexican drug cartel violence has crossed the border, is the primary reason why California juries are expressing collective lethal hostility toward Latinos.

            The problem with this Californian reasoning is that the  latest FBI Uniform Crime Report shows that violence in the four border states have significantly decreased in recent years. Violent crime in the southwest border counties is down by 30 percent—the lowest in several decades. In fact, San Diego, one of the nation’s 25 largest cities with one in four residents its residents being Hispanic, has the lowest number of violent crimes per capita in the United States.

            Nogales, Arizona Assistant Chief of Police Ray Bermudez told the Arizona Republic: “We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico. You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all America.”

            The FBI crime report supports Bermudez’s claim. Not only Nogales but Yuma, Douglas, and other border towns saw their violent crime rate remain essentially the same over the past decade.

            But juries, especially in California and other border states, don’t care about the “facts.” They are driven by fear, and fear is almost always the product of too little information. Fear awakens racial bias and even hatred—and that is why predominantly white and African American juries have targeted Latinos for the death penalty in the “nation’s most liberal state.”

            Let’s just hope those California juries, and the communities they represent, are prepared to pay the costs for the increased death penalties. The ACLU report said the State will be forced to spend $1 billion on the death penalty over the next five years. That’s one hell of a price tag for fear-induced revenge targeted at the one segment of the population that has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the country.