Sacramento prosecutors wrong to seek death penalty in Land Park murder of Kate Tibbitts

Troy Davis stands accused of committing a truly gruesome constellation of crimes, having been charged with raping and murdering 61-year-old Kate Tibbitts in her Land Park home last September. Tibbitts’ Golden Retriever rescues, Molly and Jenny, were also killed in the attack, and then her 11th Avenue house was set on fire. Naturally, the outrage over that brutality was only compounded by the fact that Davis should have been incarcerated at the time.

But that does not mean Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is right to pursue the death penalty in this case.

Capital cases are as much as 70% more expensive to try. And would a death sentence make Californians any safer?

It’s hard to see how it would, and not only because the likelihood of Davis ever being executed in California is so small that it’s theoretical. If he is found guilty, he will never see the outside of a cell again.

A death sentence might give a boost to Schubert’s campaign to become the state’s attorney general, but it would accomplish nothing else.

Unfortunately, California is one of the 27 states that still has a death penalty, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has suspended it. Prosecutors continue to pursue capital cases on occasion in the hope that some future administration will decide to reinstate it.

But no argument for state executions is convincing. We know the death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime. We know it’s not administered fairly. We know studies have found that as many as 1 of every 25 people sentenced to death in this country is innocent of the crime of which they were convicted. Even the argument that executions provide “closure” to the families of murder victims doesn’t hold up.

Basically, what’s left is that vengeance feels good — or so we think. “Killing’s too good for him,” we say of the worst criminals. But aren’t we too good to be in the business of killing them?

California deserves better than to have even those guilty of the most egregious crimes killed in our name.

And the U.S. does not deserve to remain in the moral universe inhabited by the world’s other top executioners: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

There can be no justification for what happened to Tibbitts on Sept. 3, 2021. And whatever you think of releasing non-violent offenders without bail, there’s no way even under current law and practice that Davis should have remained free after violating his parole last summer. On June 22, he was arrested in connection with a car theft but released before appearing in court — even though his long criminal history includes charges of resisting an officer, battery of an officer, threatening an officer, possession of methamphetamine, misdemeanor sexual battery and assault and battery.

His parole officer never heard anything about this new arrest until after Tibbitts was dead, and no one in this whole broken system was willing to take any personal responsibility for that lapse: For whatever reason, the arresting officer in Elk Grove didn’t request a “parole hold.” Not our responsibility, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said.

Sheriff Scott Jones went so far as to blame “social justice warriors,” writing on Facebook that Davis had been “unceremoniously released under the darling of social justice warriors — zero bail.” Darling or not, you aren’t supposed to get zero bail for the crimes he was on parole for, and new arrests are supposed to invalidate parole.

Pursuing the death penalty now won’t undo that colossal blunder. Nor will it bring back a woman whose passion in life was preventing cruelty to animals.