I read a lot of the California death penalty cases. Indeed, for the past thirty years, all of them.
Even having read all those cases, with some incredibly terrible crimes, it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for these two defendants. Their systemic crimes are pretty darn bad. As are the things they say thereafter.
Plus, I gotta say, check out pages 49 through 54 of the opinion. Both of them are pretty darn sophisticated in assessing whether being sentenced to death actually means they're going to die. I'm not sure I agree with them about their tactical decision. But they definitely thought about it at some length. They thought it made more sense for them to be sentenced to death rather than life. (And, in a bizarre reality, they cared -- weirdly, for good reason -- much more about the size of their restitution orders than whether they were sentenced to death or not.)
What a weird world in which we live.
