Letter from Sacramento

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The prosecutor who wrote the 1977 death penalty initiative which remains the law by which California still permanently silences its worst behaved citizens has passionately labored the past ten years to undo his work.

Over the course of thirty-five years, Donald Heller went from certainty of the rightness of capital punishment, to absolute certainty that capital punishment is wrong because no moral society should risk executing an innocent person.

He wrote to me today to remind me why. He told me he still thinks he said it best, in a short piece he published a decade ago. Called “From Certainty, Change,” his original title was “It Doesn’t Fucking Work.”

I agree, and it’s here, below.