LOS ANGELES -- California currently has 592 people in our prisons who have been sentenced to death.

It's the largest population of prisoners awaiting execution of any state. An astounding 175 of those inmates were sentenced from Los Angeles County courts, giving L.A. the dubious distinction of holding more men (and three women) on death row than any state except Florida. In fact, there are currently more people from L.A. awaiting execution than in all of Texas.

So it's fair to say that Los Angeles still plays a big part in death penalty discussions nationwide, at a time when our president is pushing for greater use of it, even though the intrinsic racism and unfairness of the ultimate sentence is increasingly acknowledged even by the prosecutors who use it.

That seemingly includes L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman, who wrote not long ago that he is "well aware of the troubled history of the death penalty, of those who have later been vindicated, and of the philosophical issues concerning its implementation."

Which makes it all the more troubling that Hochman recently announced he would reverse the policy of his predecessor, George Gascón, and once again consider pursuing the death penalty in certain "exceedingly rare" types of murder cases (the death penalty can already be sought only in murders with special circumstances, such as the killing of a police officer).

Returning to death sentences is "a terrible idea," Michael Romano, a Stanford law professor and chair of the California Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, told me, and I couldn't agree more.

"It's racist," Romano said. "And all of the problems with the death penalty are exacerbated in Los Angeles."

If Hochman's decision is a mistake, it's one grounded in politics and hubris — an erroneous belief that he can conjure a recipe that unbakes the abuse from the cake.

It "reflects a kind of arrogance about the reliability of our system," Bryan Stevenson told me. He's a civil rights lawyer who has argued death penalty cases at the Supreme Court, and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Ala.

"There's been a lot of progress in L.A. to confront bias against the poor, bias against people of color," Stevenson said. But "those issues have not been resolved in the way that you can impose the kind of perfect process that the death penalty requires."

This isn't some far-left progressive take. Nationally, it's estimated that 1 in 25 people sentenced to death are innocent, and more states, most recently Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado, are banning the death penalty.

The acknowledged problems with its fairness were part of the reason Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 issued an executive moratorium on executions in California, pointing out that "death sentences are unevenly and unfairly applied to people of color, people with mental disabilities, and people who cannot afford costly legal representation."

In Los Angeles County from 2012 to 2019, none of the 22 people sentenced to death were white, according to a 2021 death penalty report by Romano's committee.

Overall, nearly 50% of the people L.A. has sent to death row are Black, according to the report, almost 30% are Latino — and less than 15% are white. The systemic biases that lead to those skewed statistics are hard to pin down, and often creep in subtly at every step of the legal process. For example, when the murder victim is white, studies show prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty than for a victim of color.

I spoke with Hochman about his reasons for adding the death penalty back into the mix, and he said some of his decision was about ending the kind of "blanket bans" that Gascón had implemented when Gascón refused to seek the death penalty — ever.

That's the politics. Hochman campaigned on bringing back capital punishment as part of a tough-on-crime platform, and he's delivering. He argues that while the death penalty remains legal in California — with voters across the state repeatedly failing to end it — it's his responsibility to use it, albeit carefully.

"When I took the oath of district attorney, and it said I was going to uphold all the laws of the state of California, I didn't see an asterisk on that oath, and I'm not allowed to cross my fingers and say that I'll only support the laws that I personally want to enact or effectuate," he said.

That, however, is a bit disingenuous. Prosecutors use their discretion all the time, and in fact are expected to use that wide latitude in decision-making to ensure they aren't just acting within the law, but in the interests of justice.

That discretion to pursue what is right over what is simply legal is "what has led prosecutors across our state and the country to create conviction integrity units that examine old cases; to lobby to change laws on how young people are interrogated and sentenced; to question police shootings and perform independent investigations," Romano pointed out.

"If prosecutors limited themselves to following laws instead of leading on justice, it would shortchange both public safety and the fairness we seek in our criminal justice system," he said.

And consider this: In 2016, Proposition 62, which sought to repeal the death penalty, did fail, as Hochman points out — but not in Los Angeles County. Here, 52% of voters were in favor of replacing it with life in prison with no possibility of parole. Those were similar to results in 2012, when Proposition 34, which also sought to end the death penalty, was approved by 54% of Los Angeles voters.

So the death penalty isn't much of a winner with Angelenos. My guess is few people would be outraged if Hochman made an exception to his blanket ban on blanket bans and left the death penalty in the trash bin, campaign promises aside.

Hochman said, instead, that he planned on making death penalty decisions both more rapidly and with a multilayered process that would involve not just prosecutors, but also allow defense litigators to argue mitigating factors.

He used two examples of the kinds of cases where he would consider it, both mass shootings — the 2012 shooting of 26 people, including 20 children, in Sandy Hook, Conn., and the 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400.

While both of those crimes are terrible and certainly deserving of harsh punishment, they also highlight the subjectivity of the "exceedingly rare" standard he's using.

What about serial killers? What about a school shooting where the deaths are single-digit? What about simply a parent whose child is murdered, the worst loss imaginable to them, like the recent, tragic killing of 13-year-old Oscar Omar Hernandez, allegedly by a soccer coach who is now charged by Hochman with a special circumstance murder eligible for the death penalty?

Elisabeth Semel, a professor of law at UC Berkeley and founding director of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said it is "elusive and slippery" to pin down what are the most egregious crimes, worthy of death. "It gives a real enormous latitude for arbitrariness," she said. "And one of the worst failings of the death penalty is its arbitrariness."

Hochman said he's not worried about racial bias in death penalty cases today, because "there's the numerous protections that have been put in place to deal with that particular issue, circa 2025 in Los Angeles County."

He points to the 2020 Racial Justice Act, which gives defense attorneys the ability to challenge perceived racial bias in real time, as a key protection. He adds that "the sensitivities that prosecutors have themselves developed over the years to implicit and explicit racial bias, the sensitivity the courts have also developed to those issues and the very talented defense bar that exists in Los Angeles County that will ferret out any types of racial bias" also protect defendants.

That's a far more controversial assertion than Hochman makes it seem, and more than one district attorney in the state argues the opposite.

Last year, after a visit to Legacy Sites, a museum and memorial in Montgomery led by Stevenson focused on the intertwined histories of criminal justice and slavery, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen took an unprecedented step. He asked the court to resentence every death penalty conviction ever won in Santa Clara County to life without parole.

"It doesn't mean that I think things are as bad today as they were 50 years ago," Rosen told me at the time. "But I also trusted that as a society, we could ensure the fundamental fairness of the legal process for all people. With every exoneration, with every story of racial injustice, it becomes clear to me that this is not the world we live in."

The state Supreme Court is also weighing in unexpectedly. Last year, it agreed to move forward on a case brought by the Office of the State Public Defender, which handles appeals for death penalty cases, charging that the inherent racial bias in the death penalty makes it illegal under the California Constitution.

Though the suit names California Attorney General Rob Bonta as the defendant, Bonta has also spoken about problems with the death penalty and his office has encouraged the court to review the case. The case is moving slowly, but could potentially end the death penalty in California.

In the meantime, Hochman retains the right to try to enforce state law as he sees fit.

But at a perilous point in history when Black and brown Americans are under attack, when the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion have been targeted for eradication, when the history of slavery and civil rights is literally being erased, our district attorney has chosen a path that asks us to believe a justice system that historically has discriminated in the most serious of moments will be cured of its past under his guidance.

That leaves Los Angeles with a death penalty policy that throws out evidence, and justice, in favor of hubris.

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