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Thread: California Capital Punishment News

  1. #251
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Proposition 66, once it gets the California Supreme Court's imprimatur, should eliminate the need to have the DOC's lethal-injection protocol comply with the Administrative Procedure Act.

    3604.1. (a) The Administrative Procedure Act shall not apply to standards, procedures, or regulations promulgated pursuant to Section 3604. The department shall make the standards adopted under subdivision (a) of that section available to the public and to inmates sentenced to death. The department shall promptly notify the Attorney General, the State Public Defender, and counsel for any inmate for whom an execution date has been set or for whom a motion to set an execution date is pending of any adoption or amendment of the standards. Noncompliance with this subdivision is not a ground for stay of an execution or an injunction against carrying out an execution unless the noncompliance has actually prejudiced the inmate’s ability to challenge the standard, and in that event the stay shall be limited to a maximum of 10 days.

    http://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2016/gener...aws.pdf#prop66

  2. #252
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    California rejects proposed new death penalty rules

    Efforts to revive the death penalty in California were dealt another blow late last month when a state agency tasked with reviewing regulatory changes rejected a proposed new lethal injection protocol.

    The decision by the Office of Administrative Law came one day after the California Supreme Court blocked implementation of Proposition 66, an initiative passed by voters in November to expedite capital punishment, pending the outcome of a lawsuit.

    In a 25-page decision of disapproval released on Dec. 28, the OAL cited inconsistencies and ambiguities in the protocol, insufficient justification for some regulations and a need for further response to public comments.

    The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has four months to resubmit its proposal. Spokeswoman Terry Thornton said the department plans to fix the issues identified by the OAL.

    Executions were halted in 2006 because of legal challenges alleging that California’s lethal injection method violated the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    The corrections department began developing a new protocol last year that replaced its old three-drug cocktail with a 7.5-gram, single-drug dose of one of four barbiturates: amobarbital, pentobarbital, secobarbital or thiopental.

    Among the questions raised by the OAL was why inmates would be injected with 7.5 grams of a barbiturate when corrections officials acknowledged 5 grams is a sufficiently lethal dose. It also asked for additional explanations on a $50 limit for inmates’ last meals and why inmates would be offered the option of taking a sedative before the execution begins.

    The majority of the decision focused on ambiguities in the protocol that the OAL said needed to be clarified. These included the timeline for steps taken in the days and hours leading up to an execution, how to proceed if an inmate does not immediately die, what sedative options are available and who must administer them, what proposed monthly “security and operational inspections” of the execution chamber would entail, and under what conditions a warden should raise inquiry into an inmate’s sanity.

    http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-...124564724.html

  3. #253
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    "Among the questions raised by the OAL was why inmates would be injected with 7.5 grams of a barbiturate when corrections officials acknowledged 5 grams is a sufficiently lethal dose. It also asked for additional explanations on a $50 limit for inmates’ last meals and why inmates would be offered the option of taking a sedative before the execution begins."

    Political questions. If the proposal was for 5 grams the OAL would ask why it wasn't 7.5 to make sure. And who cares what the limit is on the last meals? Make it $10. Make it $100. The bureaucrats and attorneys who wrote that question spent more state money asking that question (and more will be spent answering it) than if they made the limit $1000 (or, given that California isn't executing anyone, they could make it a million and it wouldn't matter). And then the last one is the one that made me want to respond. Who could be absurd enough to ask why someone about to die might be given a sedative? Why do they think? And of course if it weren't in there, they'd complain that it wasn't. I hate this sort of disingenuous stuff.

  4. #254
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Fact's Avatar
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    You're going to need another effing ballot question to put a lethal injection protocol in place.

  5. #255
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    On January 13, 2017, three California murderers were sentenced to death in three separate cases: Elias Carmona Lopez, Johnny Lopez and Darnell Washington. That must be some sort of post-Gregg record.

  6. #256
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    California eases conditions at death row disciplinary unit

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California will no longer keep death row inmates in solitary confinement for years only because of their purported gang affiliations, according to a lawsuit settlement announced Monday.

    Six San Quentin State Prison inmates sued in 2015, saying they were being held indefinitely under inhumane and degrading conditions in what prison officials call the "adjustment center." One inmate had been there for 26 years and two others for more than a decade when the lawsuit was filed.

    About 100 inmates were held when the lawsuit was filed. The number had recently dropped to less than 10, although the corrections department said Monday that it has since increased to 22 inmates.

    "I think that this settlement provides for a more humane treatment of prisoners who are in that very difficult situation, facing the death penalty," said Dan Siegel, an Oakland-based attorney who filed the lawsuit.

    Inmates can still be sent to the windowless cells if they are considered an immediate danger to the prison or others, or if they have at least three infractions within five years for offenses including fighting or possessing drugs or cellphones. The length of their disciplinary sentences can be increased by half if they are gang members.

    But the maximum length of time in the adjustment center is five years, with a review every six months to see if they can be released. They also can have certain property taken away as punishment for no more than 90 days, according to the settlement obtained by The Associated Press before it was filed in federal court.

    The adjustment center is one of three units in the nation's largest death row, which has 749 condemned inmates.

    The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had already changed its policies and none of the plaintiffs are in the center anymore, spokeswoman Vicky Waters said.

    The lawsuit is patterned after a class-action lawsuit that the state settled in September 2015. California agreed then to end its unlimited isolation of imprisoned gang leaders, a practice that once kept hundreds of inmates in isolation for a decade or longer.

    "The safety of California prisons in terms of risks to staff and other prisoners has really not been enhanced by keeping people in solitary," Siegel said.

    The state will pay inmates' attorneys $245,000 under the agreement.

    http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=...5&catId=112032
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  7. #257
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    Trying to speed up executions could deal 'mortal blow' to California Supreme Court

    By Maura Dolan
    The Los Angeles Times

    If a November ballot measure to speed up executions goes into effect, the California Supreme Court will have to decide hundreds of death penalty appeals in rapid succession.

    That mandate would turn the state’s highest court into what analysts say would be “a death penalty court,” forced for years to devote about 90% of its time to capital appeals.

    Proposition 66, sponsored by prosecutors and passed by 51% of voters, gave judicial leaders 1½ years to make new legal rules and then five years to decide a crushing backlog of appeals.

    “Prop. 66 would require the California Supreme Court to decide virtually nothing but death penalty appeals for at least the next five years — almost no civil cases at all and no criminal cases other than capital murder,” said Jon Eisenberg, president of the California Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

    Legal analysts and four bar associations say the measure would inundate all the courts with extra work but hit the top court’s seven justices hardest.

    In a friend-of-the-court brief, 11 law professors and a nonprofit legal center contended Proposition 66 would “grind the wheels of justice to a halt” in California.

    Death penalty advocates acknowledge the measure would mean extra work for the courts, but say that it is necessary to fix a system that has produced the largest death row in the country and no executions in more than a decade.

    They contend the workload will be tolerable, and that the courts will have some flexibility in meeting the deadlines.

    The California Supreme Court is considering whether the measure can go into effect.

    Two opponents of the measure sued in November, contending it illegally usurped the powers of the judicial branch and violated a constitutional rule that says ballot measures must deal with one subject only.

    The California Supreme Court put the measure on hold until the justices resolve the case, probably within the next few months.

    The appellate lawyers’ academy takes no position on the death penalty but opposed the initiative on the grounds that it would disrupt the courts and prevent litigants in civil matters from having their cases decided in a timely manner.

    It joined the bar associations of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and San Francisco in a January letter written to the state Supreme Court saying that Proposition 66 “threatens to deal a mortal blow” to California’s courts.

    California law guarantees each death row inmate both an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court and a separate habeas corpus challenge.

    The direct appeal is based on what happened at trial. The habeas raises issues that were not reflected in the trial transcript, such as newly discovered misconduct by jurors or prosecutors.

    The California Supreme Court has been unable to keep pace with these cases.

    Given a backlog of more than 300 death penalty appeals already at the court, the justices would have to decide at least 66 of them each year for the next several years just to catch up, Eisenberg said.

    Calculations based on the court’s typical annual production indicate the justices would be spending 90% of their time on capital cases, Eisenberg said. Civil case rulings would decline from about 50 a year to just a handful, he said.

    “That leaves virtually no time for anything other than death penalty cases,” Eisenberg said.

    Lower courts, as well as the California Supreme Court, would be disrupted, the bar associations said.

    The measure would require Superior Court judges to appoint lawyers to handle habeas corpus challenges and to decide those cases quickly.

    The letter noted that 110 condemned inmates from Los Angeles County would have to be given lawyers within a year. The clock would start once the Judicial Council, the policymaking body for the court, establishes rules to implement the initiative.

    “We are not aware of there being 110 qualified capital habeas corpus practitioners within the Los Angeles County area,” the letter said.

    Kirk C. Jenkins, an appellate lawyer who studies and writes about the California Supreme Court for the law firm Sedgwick LLP, said the bar associations were right.

    “The time limit that is built into Prop. 66 is completely unworkable, and that is not a matter of one’s position on the death penalty,” Jenkins said. “It is simply unworkable.”

    The only way to meet the deadlines of Proposition 66 would be for the court “to get out of the business of deciding civil cases” at least for several years, Jenkins said.

    UC Berkeley's David A. Carrillo, director of a center that studies the California Constitution, described the initiative as a new unfunded mandate.

    "There is no way the courts can get through the existing backlog in five years with their current resources," Carrillo said.

    Law enforcement groups have filed several friend-of-the-court briefs in favor of the initiative, arguing that voters have made their will clear.

    “California voters have elected to retain the death penalty every time the issue has been placed before them,” the leaders of several county prosecutor groups reminded the court in one brief.

    The lawsuit against the measure named the Judicial Council as a defendant, forcing Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Justice Ming W. Chin to recuse themselves from the case. The chief justice heads the council, and Chin serves on it.

    Two of the five other justices will appear for confirmation on next year’s statewide ballot: Justice Carol A. Corrigan, one of the more conservative members, and Justice Leondra Kruger, appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown two years ago.

    California voters have voted down justices on the ballot only once. The issue was the death penalty.

    “Despite the abiding and long-standing will of the voters, death penalty opponents have used the legal process as a mechanism to frustrate imposition of the death penalty,” the prosecutors argued in their brief.

    Lawyers on both sides of the debate expect the court to hold a hearing on the case. Two justices from intermediate courts of appeal likely would be asked to fill in for the recused justices

    Kent Scheidegger, who helped write Proposition 66, said the portrait of court chaos predicted by the bar associations and some analysts was overblown.

    Although the measure would require the California Supreme Court to move quickly to dispatch the backlog of capital appeals, the initiative would also shift initial responsibility for habeas challenges from the high court to trial judges, he noted.

    That provision, Scheidegger argued, would save the court time.

    Rulings by Superior Court judges on those cases would likely be appealed to intermediate appellate courts and up to the state Supreme Court, but Scheidegger said the trial judges would do the heavy lifting.

    “I know that all judges hate time limits, but I do think that moving the habeas cases is a reform that most of the justices probably would agree with,” said Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which advocates for the death penalty.

    Even if the Supreme Court were to strike down the measure’s deadlines, other requirements of the initiative would still speed up executions, he said.

    He cited a provision that would limit public review of the state’s lethal injection method. Legal challenges involving the method have kept the execution chamber empty since 2006.

    Eighteen inmates who have exhausted their appeals could be executed immediately once that part of the initiative took effect, he said.

    Former El Dorado County Supervisor Ron Briggs and the late former Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, who filed the lawsuit, argued that the entire measure should be tossed because it violated the rule limiting initiatives to a single subject.

    In addition to setting new deadlines and easing approval of an execution protocol, Proposition 66 would require death-row inmates to work to pay compensation to victims’ families and bar medical associations from disciplining doctors who participate in executions.

    It also would place a state agency assigned to represent death row inmates under California Supreme Court control and permit the corrections department to distribute condemned inmates among the general prison population.

    The law says a measure’s provisions must be “reasonably germane” to the purpose of the initiative.

    Polls show support for the death penalty in California has declined since 1986, when voters ousted the late Chief Justice Rose Bird and two colleagues after a campaign that charged they were not enforcing capital punishment.

    Still, voters narrowly rejected a 2012 ballot measure to abolish capital punishment and turned down a similar initiative in November, with 53% of voters opposed.

    http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...402-story.html

  8. #258
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    California’s death row turning into home for seniors

    By Phillip Reese
    The Fresno Bee

    California’s death row houses more senior citizens than most of the state’s nursing homes.

    Ninety California death-row inmates are at least 65 years old, corrections records show. The number of seniors on death row has grown by nearly 500 percent since early 2006, when the state housed 16 seniors.

    California has not executed a prisoner since 2006, largely due to legal challenges to its lethal injection protocol. California voters approved Proposition 66 in November, demanding that the state speed up the death penalty process. The implementation of Proposition 66 is on hold as the Supreme Court rules on its constitutionality.

    If California starts executing prisoners again, there is a strong chance that it will kill several elderly inmates. Condemned inmates over 65 committed their crimes an average of 31 years ago; a large number of their sentences have been upheld by the California Supreme Court.

    Executing the elderly rarely happens in the United States. Just 19 of the 1,448 U.S. executions that have taken place during the last 40 years have involved a killer over the age of 65.

    California currently has – by a wide margin – the highest number of seniors on death row. About 12 percent of the state’s 749 condemned inmates are at least 65. In the four other states with the largest death rows – Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Alabama – about 7 percent of condemned inmates are at least 65.

    The oldest person executed in the modern era was John Nixon, who was 77 when Mississippi killed him in 2005. Five condemned inmates in California are older than Nixon.

    http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/...145889979.html

    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  9. #259
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    ACLU Death Penalty Challenge Faces Skeptical Court

    HAYWARD, Calif. (CN) — ACLU attorneys faced a tough fight Thursday in asking the state judge who dismissed its case challenging California’s execution procedures to reconsider the tentative ruling she issued in March.

    Alameda County Court Judge Kimberly Colwell tentatively dismissed the Eighth Amendment lawsuit on March 30 without leave to amend. On Thursday, ACLU attorney Linda Lye told Colwell that the Legislature violated the California Constitution’s separation of powers clause by tasking prison officials with developing an execution protocol, but not providing guidance on how to carry out executions.

    “CDCR [the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] is supposed to kill people, but we don’t know what kind death. A lingering death, a painful death, a painless death, a swift death?” Lye asked. “Simply telling Corrections to comply with the statute does not constitute guidance.”

    To align California death penalty law with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, the Legislature in 1996 prescribed lethal injection as the method for executions. It directed the Department of Corrections to develop the actual execution procedures.

    The ACLU claims that the Legislature — not a state agency — must develop the execution procedures to address “fundamental policy questions” such as the pain and speed of executions.

    The ACLU sued the Department of Corrections in November on behalf of death row inmates Mitchell Sims and Michael Morales.

    The lawsuit was filed nine days after the general election, in which California voters narrowly approved Proposition 66, by 51 percent to 49 percent, to accelerate executions by limiting habeas corpus petitions and requiring death penalty appeals to be completed within five years of the death sentence, among other things. Also on Election Day, voters rejected a proposition to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without parole.

    The ACLU says the Legislature is more likely than prison officials to design procedures that reduce pain and the amount of time it takes to die. It said in the original complaint that the state’s plan to switch from a three-drug protocol to use of a single drug could increase pain, and accused it of making the switch for convenience.

    The state says using one drug will reduce pain.

    Colwell did not seem sympathetic to Lye’s separation of powers argument Thursday.

    “Isn’t that particular agency, that administers the death penalty, in the best position to know how that is carried out?” the judge asked.

    “With guidance, yes,” Lye responded. She said that while severe pain is the constitutional limit, the Legislature is responsible for determining what that threshold is.

    Lye said the Legislature could choose to make executions retributive for an inmate’s crime, and thus severely painful, and it would still satisfy its responsibility under the separation of powers clause.

    While acknowledging that the Department of Corrections has the expertise to develop execution procedures, Lye said, “all the Legislature needed was to paint in broad brushes and provide more guidance” about the acceptable level of pain, and prison officials “could fill in the details.”

    However, “The idea that complying with the Constitution is a sufficient standard is too vague,” she said.

    Colwell rejected that argument in her tentative ruling of March 30.

    “Petitioners have not … cited to any authority for the proposition that a legislature that has made the fundamental decision to have a death penalty cannot set the standard as the constitutional minimum and delegate to prison officials the task of developing a constitutional execution protocol,” she wrote. “After the Legislature has indicated that CDCR was to develop an execution protocol to comply with the United States Constitution, then the Legislature could add little more.”

    There are 750 inmates on California’s death row. The state has executed 13 prisoners since it reinstituted the death penalty in 1978. It performed its last execution in 2006.

    http://www.courthousenews.com/aclu-d...eptical-court/
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  10. #260
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    ACLU's California Lethal Injection Suit Dismissed

    By Kent Scheidegger
    crimeandconsequences.com

    Immediately after last November's election, two lawsuits were filed by the anti-death-penalty crowd in California. One of them, in the California Supreme Court, seeks to block the voter-approved reform measure, Proposition 66. Briefing in that case is completed, and we are waiting with bated breath for oral argument to be set.

    The second case was filed by the ACLU in Superior Court in Oakland, Alameda County. This suit claims that the statute specifying lethal injection as the method of execution and leaving it to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to fill in the details violates the separation of powers. This thesis has been rejected by courts nationwide except Arkansas. Seriously, you would have to go all the way back to 1935 and the notorious "sick chicken case" to find such a cramped view of delegation in the federal courts or any but an aberrant few state courts.

    CDCR filed a demurrer. That's legalspeak for "even if all the facts you allege were true, you would still have no case as a matter of law." It's a way to get rid of a bogus case at the threshold instead of going to trial.

    Today Judge Kimberly Colwell sustained the demurrer without leave to amend. That's legalspeak for "You're outta here and don't come back."

    The early pages of the order are background and rejecting CDCR's arguments why the court should not reach the merits. The good stuff is the merits discussion beginning on the bottom of page 8.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...al-inject.html

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