Republicans in the California Senate have killed a bill that would have imposed a three year moratorium on executions in the state.

There are a lot of reasons to suspend or eliminate California's death penalty. Elisabeth Semel, director of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic names a few in this op-ed last week:

...the line that divides those we execute and those we do not remains as arbitrary and capricious as it was in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared it constitutionally intolerable.

...each of the 11 executions after 1977 cost Californians a quarter of a billion dollars. The article found that, for institutional reasons, the cost of housing death-sentenced inmates is three times that of the general population. A capital trial costs at least three times as much as a non-capital murder trial. It takes tens of millions of dollars annually to pay for courts, prosecutors and defense counsel.