Elisabeth Semel interviewed by CalTV, October 27, 2012
“If you look at those four thousand people serving the sentence of life without possibility of parole, and you compare them to the 725 people on death row, what you will find is people convicted of the same crimes…. What we see in California is that crime rises and crime falls for various reasons having to do with the economy and all sorts of other considerations, but the amount of violent crime is not traceable to whether we have a deathpenalty or don’t.”