Guilty! First Degree Murder, Second Degree Murder and Special Circumstances. Making him eligible for the death penalty. Now we must enter the sentencing aspect of the trial which will be a very trying time for the family of Laci Peterson. However I beg the question, do we even need to present the death penalty to the jury as an option? Since 1977 over 600 men and women have been sentenced to death in California. However, in the same time span only 10 inmates on death row have actually been executed, for an average of one every 2.7 years. While I am a supporter of the death penalty and feel that it would be a deterrent to crime if executed in a swift manner, the current state of enforcement on California's death row has changed my mind. At the rate we are currently executing people on death row 99% of them will die in prison before being executed, so let's just commute their sentences to life without parole and save some money in the process. This way we could cancel the new death row construction at San Quentin and move these criminals back into regular prisons. We should also be able to reduce some burden off of the court system by doing so and save money in legal fees.