U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein built her very long and successful political career staking out the Democratic party’s moderate turf: For gun control, for the environment, for Obamacare, for the death penalty.
Well, not so much that last bit anymore. Feinstein revealed Wednesday that she’s shed her support for the death penalty “as it exists today.”
“Several years ago I changed my view of the death penalty,” Feinstein said in an emailed statement. “It became crystal clear to me that the risk of unequal application is high and its effect on deterrence is low.”
Feinstein — now facing a primary challenge to her re-election from more liberal Democrats — never trumpeted her flip on the death penalty, which was hotly debated in California just two years ago with dueling ballot initiatives to end executions or hurry them up. Voters in 2016 decisively rejected the initiative to repeal the death penalty and narrowly approved the measure limiting time for appeals to speed the path from Death Row to the execution chamber.
It was unclear when Feinstein came to her change of heart on capital punishment. Her campaign said she shared her evolved viewpoint with California party delegates in a Feb. 19 phone call, and also provided an undated letter she had sent “earlier” to constituents who asked her position.
Her new position didn’t surface publicly until Wednesday when she confirmed it for a Los Angeles Times article.
Feinstein’s leading Democratic re-election challengers like state Sen. Kevin de León, who opposes the death penalty, haven’t made capital punishment an issue in the race. Most polls give her a comfortable lead, with de León as the runner-up who would compete head to head with her in November.
But de León campaign spokesman Jonathan Underland said Wednesday that Feinstein’s “latest flip on the death penalty is yet another appeal to California voters who have outgrown her centrist bent.”
“That being said, we are glad her views are coming more in line with California voters,” Underland said. “But the timeline here makes us wonder how long this change of heart will last.”
De León and other party critics to Feinstein’s left have mostly argued she’s not bare-knuckled enough in fighting President Trump on pretty much everything.
Political analysts said Feinstein’s change of heart had an aura of sincerity, given that she didn’t advertise it.
“If it was a craven attempt at popularity it’s a misfire,” said Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor who has followed the Senate race.
“It’s entirely reasonable for someone to change position on an issue when they’re presented with changing information,” said political analyst Dan Schnur. But he added that reflects de León’s effect of pulling her leftward on issues.
“It probably ends up helping her,” Schnur said, “if only because it deprives de León of the ideological oxygen he needs to make inroads against her.”
Feinstein’s former support for capital punishment helped launch her career in statewide politics in the 1990s, at a time when California overall was far less liberal. In 1990, liberal activists at the Democratic state party convention booed the former San Francisco supervisor and mayor for supporting the death penalty and denied her the endorsement for governor. But she defeated the more liberal state Attorney General John Van de Kamp in the primary before losing the general election to Republican Pete Wilson.
In the Senate, Feinstein voted in 1994 to reject using racial statistics in death penalty appeals and in 1996 to limit death penalty appeals.
In 2004, Feinstein publicly split with Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney and now her Democratic partner in the Senate, over the death penalty for a cop killer. Harris had declined to seek the death penalty, and at the officer’s funeral, Feinstein said that the cop’s death was “the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law” and remarked that she might not have supported Harris as D.A. had she known of her opposition to capital punishment.
But in her letter to constituents, Feinstein explained that the growing number of inmates found through DNA evidence to have been innocent has made her increasingly uncomfortable with the death penalty.
“No one in America should be falsely executed,” Feinstein wrote, “and I believe our criminal justice system must do more to prevent false convictions, especially where the defendant is subject to the death penalty.”
