DEATH OR LIFE: GOVERNORS DON'T AGREE.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

IN A tale of two governors, Illinois' George Ryan emptied his state's Death Row last week, and our own Gray Davis made arrangements to expand California's.

For Ryan, commuting the sentences of some 167 condemned inmates was a self-sacrificial act, ending his term and setting his legacy on a decidedly unpopular note. Looking over the catalog of his state's capital cases, he could find none that was clean, untainted by a legal system beset with error and corruption. Unwilling to chance executing even one innocent man, he made the difficult decision of giving life sentences to the whole lot of Illinois' Death Row inmates.

For Davis, who chose the middle of an epic budget crisis to announce plans for a new, $220 million Death Row facility at San Quentin, the motives were a little less idealistic. The governor still nurses presidential ambitions, and he knows the political value of looking tough on crime, even to the point of farce.

And ``farce'' is a charitable way to describe California's capital punishment system.

Despite a population of 603 Death Row inmates, one that grows by roughly 20 each year, the state rarely executes anyone. Since reinstituting the death penalty in 1978, California has executed only 11 inmates, each of whom spent an average of 16 years on Death Row before meeting his fate.

More condemned California inmates (13) have died at their own hands than in the execution chamber, and more than twice as many (23) have died of other causes while waiting behind bars for the interminable appeals process to run its course.

That's to say, the overwhelming majority of Californians sentenced to death never actually face the death penalty. Here, capital punishment exists largely in name only, from which it follows that capital punishment's two great promises - ultimate justice and deterrence - can scarcely be said to exist.

A farce, indeed, and a pricey one at that, one that now stands to cost the state an additional $220 million for a modernized Death Row at a time when it can least afford it.

For that matter, it stands to question whether California can afford capital punishment at all these days. Under state law, each death penalty case must go to trial under special rules that drive up the cost of litigation, and with an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. Then, even if the state's justices sign off on an execution, it can still be tied up for years longer by specific constitutional appeals, both at the state and federal levels.

At almost every step of the way, there are juries, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, bailiffs, court reporters, psychologists and forensic experts to be paid, all at the public's expense. It's estimated that the total cost of trying, housing and executing a Death Row inmate can run more than 40 percent higher than that of simply sticking him behind bars for the rest of his natural life.

All in all, California's quarter-century dalliance with capital punishment, which has yielded just 11 executions, has cost roughly $2 billion.

But farce beats the alternative - tragedy.

Without the intense sort of scrutiny that California pays to its capital cases, the criminal justice system would run a great risk of putting innocent people to death, those who became easy targets for overly aggressive cops or overly ambitious prosecutors. For the 11 inmates the state has executed over the past 25 years, it has seen 62 others released, resentenced or have their sentences overturned.

No human system will ever be perfect, and criminal justice is no exception. But there's a tremendous moral difference between putting an innocent man behind bars and putting him to death, thus the need for extreme caution in capital cases.

Speeding up the process might make the system a more cost-efficient, credible deterrent to crime, but it would also create an intolerable hazard, one that routinely puts innocent lives at risk - the very problem that Gov. Ryan, a Republican who once supported capital punishment, ran up against in Illinois.

Therein lies the paradox of the death penalty in the modern world: Justice demands as many safeguards and precautions as possible, the result of which is to render capital punishment at best an expensive symbol, at worst a cruel joke.

Neither one - expensive symbol nor cruel joke - is worth the small fortune Davis hopes to invest in California's Death Row, let alone the incalculable value of an innocent life lost.