Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert has this op-ed in the Sacramento Bee, responding to an earlier piece by Ron Briggs.  Unfortunately, it is behind the Bee's paywall.

The reason that no executions have occurred in California for 10 years is the state's delay in drafting regulations for a method of execution. Otherwise, there could have been at least 15 sentences carried out during the past decade. It's outrageous that victims' families were forced to sue the state to draft these regulations. Proposition 66 will prevent biased and unsympathetic politicians and government bureaucrats from interfering with this process.

*                       *                      *

Briggs believes abolition will benefit victims' survivors by closing cases and sparing them further "wounds." That is offensive and presumptuous. In our experience, most survivors want "justice" for the murderers of their family members. Repealing the death penalty will not heal these peoples' wounds; it keeps them permanently open.

Briggs naively touts life without parole as a sufficient alternative to the death penalty. He forgets that the last murderer executed in California, Clarence Ray Allen, was sentenced to death for the murder of three people, which he planned while already serving a life sentence for murder. Life imprisonment was not enough to protect the public from Allen.

Moreover, victims' families will always be haunted by the specter that an inmate sentenced to life without parole will suddenly ask the governor to reduce a sentence - as happened recently in the case of a Fresno murderer who waited 36 years and applied for clemency. As long as an inmate sentenced to life without parole lives, the governor could reduce the sentence and a murderer may be released on the streets.