SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Sharron Mankins, McGregor Scott and Bill Babbitt each have watched a man die inside the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, and each has a strong view on whether voters should end California's death penalty in November.

Even after 20 years, Mankins has no regrets about watching Robert Alton Harris die by cyanide gas for the 1978 murders of her 16-year-old son, Michael Baker, and his friend John Mayeski.

"We saw justice served," the 69-year-old Southern California woman said in an interview last month. "It took a long time, but it helped us all.

"I think it helped the whole family."

Scott, who witnessed the lethal-injection execution of Darrell Rich in March 2000 as the Shasta County district attorney, remembers the event with almost clinical precision.

"I do not want to minimize or downplay the fact that the man's life was taken that night," Scott said of the so-called "Hilltop Rapist," who killed four young women in a 1978 crime spree.

"But what I observed that evening could not in any way be described as cruel or unusual punishment. It was a very calm process in which he appeared to go to sleep. And that was it."

To Mankins and Scott, the death penalty is an important tool for prosecutors and victims, one that they both believe should be retained.

For Babbitt, it is a costly waste and a reminder of the night in 1999 that he watched his brother, Manuel Babbitt, die by injection for the murder of 78-year-old Leah Schendel of Sacramento.

"Why don't we take the money and fix people like Manny Babbitt …, take that money and try to solve crimes?" asked Babbitt, who turned his brother in to police after Schendel's slaying.

These are the opposing viewpoints that will play out in the coming weeks over Proposition 34, which asks voters to end the death penalty in California and allow death row inmates to be resentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole.

Supporters of the measure, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to attorneys and a former San Quentin warden, are waging a campaign based on the notion that the entire process is far too costly, and that scrapping the death penalty could save cash-strapped California hundreds of millions of dollars.

They note that legal hurdles have severely limited the state's ability to carry out executions, and that since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 only 13 men have been executed in California – the last in 2006.

Another 729 inmates are on death row awaiting executions that may be years or decades away.

"The cost of the system today is so enormous," said Don Heller, the Sacramento attorney who wrote the 1978 initiative to restore the death penalty and who now wants to do away with capital punishment.

"It's cost $4 billion to execute 13 people since 1978, approximately $330 million per execution. It makes no sense, particularly in these current economic times when we're cutting back on public safety and education."

The measure includes a provision that would take $100 million out of the state's general fund over four years and direct it to local law enforcement, money that supporters say would be more than offset by savings from ending death penalty trials, appeals and other costs.

Supporters of the death penalty say those arguments are hypocritical and just plain wrong.

"Basically, it doesn't cost as much as they claim and it doesn't need to cost as much as it does," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. "The system is entirely fixable and we've known for years how to fix it."