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Thread: California Capital Punishment News

  1. #11
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    February 21, 2009

    3 years later, state executions still on hold

    It's been three years since the night a federal judge blocked an execution at San Quentin State Prison because of concerns that the state's haphazard lethal injection methods could inflict prolonged and excruciating pain on a condemned inmate, violating the U.S. Constitution.

    Today, the state is no closer to executing the Stockton murderer-rapist who was to have died that night, Michael Morales, or any of the other 679 prisoners on the nation's largest death row. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration says it's trying to break the logjam by agreeing to let the public comment on proposed new procedures for executing convicts, a concession that it opposed in court for more than two years.

    "We believe this to be the most expeditious way to carry out the will of the people and allow California to resume capital punishment," said Seth Unger, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

    Bradley Phillips, a lawyer for Morales and another condemned prisoner, said the state could have taken that step in 2006. That's when Morales first sued in state court, arguing that prison officials couldn't legally switch execution procedures without gathering public reaction.

    Even if the state now moves quickly to evaluate public comment on the revamped injections, and rapidly persuades the federal courts that it's solved the previous problems, executions are unlikely to resume in California for at least another year.

    Support still strong

    Surveys have consistently shown that most Californians support the death penalty, although that majority has been shrinking. The last statewide Field Poll in February 2006, the month Morales was to have been executed, found that 63 percent favored keeping the death penalty, 32 percent opposed it and 5 percent had no opinion. Twenty years earlier, the same polling organization found 83 percent support.

    Lance Lindsey, executive director of the anti-capital punishment group Death Penalty Focus, acknowledged that California isn't likely to repeal its death penalty law anytime soon. But he said there has been no recorded increase in violent crime during the moratorium, which he sees as evidence for opponents' position that executions don't promote public safety.

    In light of a state commission's recent assessment that capital punishment costs California $137 million a year, "this pause in executions has allowed for political leaders to scrutinize whether the state of California can afford the death penalty," Lindsey said.

    Family's 28-year wait

    But Brian Chalk of Sacramento, the younger brother of Morales' murder victim, said he was more concerned about "the thousands and thousands of dollars we are paying every single year to keep these folks on Death Row nice and healthy and safe."

    "The bureaucracy needs to stop, and they should go ahead with all the executions that are on hold," Chalk said. "That's what the people voted for."

    Morales, now 49, raped and murdered 17-year-old Terri Winchell of Lodi (San Joaquin County) in 1981, choking, hammering and stabbing her at the behest of his jealous cousin. He was scheduled to die at San Quentin on Feb. 21, 2006, five weeks after 76-year-old triple murderer Clarence Ray Allen, the last man to be executed in California, was rolled to the death chamber in a wheelchair.

    Morales' last hope was a challenge to lethal injection, the subject of growing controversy since it became the primary method of execution in the United States in the 1990s.

    Promoted as a humane alternative to the electric chair and the gas chamber, injections use a sequence of three drugs - an anesthetic, a paralytic and a heart-stopping chemical - to cause death with no sign of suffering.

    But some witness accounts and medical studies have suggested that the process does not always work as intended. A 2005 article in the Lancet, a British medical journal, found signs of inadequate anesthesia in nearly half the executions it reviewed in four U.S. states - an indication that prisoners may have been conscious and in agony as they died.

    In blocking Morales' execution, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel cited evidence of possible problems at six lethal injections at San Quentin and said prison officials had to find someone with medical training to make sure the inmate was unconscious. Unable to enlist a doctor who would participate, the state put the execution on hold.

    After medical experts and execution witnesses testified at a trial in Fogel's San Jose courtroom, the judge halted all California executions in December 2006.

    He said the state's procedures were so badly flawed - with poorly trained staff working with unclear instructions and little monitoring in a dimly lit chamber - that they posed a risk of inflicting pain at levels that violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

    The moratorium has continued despite the U.S. Supreme Court's April 2008 ruling in a Kentucky case that lethal injections are not inherently unconstitutional because the drugs do not create a substantial risk of severe pain.

    Crawling through courts

    The ruling left room for inmates to challenge lethal injections based on evidence of flaws in a state's past executions or current policies. That issue remains in Fogel's court, where Morales' lawyers plan to argue that the proposed new procedures still contain inadequate safeguards.

    But the judge says he can't rule on California's changes until the state complies with its own law, a process that has moved at a snail's pace through state courts.

    After Fogel blocked Morales' execution, the state proposed injection methods that would include continuously infusing a sedative to keep the prisoner unconscious. Morales' lawyers sued, arguing that execution procedures are state regulations that can't be adopted without public input.

    The suit was pending more than a year later when state officials, responding to Fogel's December 2006 ruling halting all executions, presented a set of procedures that included altering chemical dosages, improving staff selection and training, and installing a new death chamber.

    Defense lawyers renewed their regulatory challenge on behalf of Morales and Mitchell Sims, 49, a triple murderer who has been sentenced to death in both California and South Carolina. In December 2007, a Marin County judge ruled in their favor and invalidated the new procedures.

    Administration gives up

    The Schwarzenegger administration went to an appeals court, lost and decided not to press the issue before the state Supreme Court.

    While fighting Morales' suit, the Corrections Department could have simultaneously gathered public comment, but didn't. Unger said the agency could issue its final regulations sometime this fall.

    Meanwhile, Chalk, who was 9 when his sister was murdered, says the family is resigned to waiting.

    "There's nothing we can do about it," he said. "The justice system is a joke."

    His sister "had everything, talent, beauty, soul," Chalk said. Executing Morales "is not going to bring Terri back," he said, but "it would definitely bring closure."

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/21/MNUV160H3C.DTL

  2. #12
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    Jerry Brown: I'll Follow Law On Death Penalty

    Attorney General Opposed Executions When He Was Governor

    California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Wednesday he understands that California's support for the death penalty is now "part of the landscape," even though he opposed executions when he was governor a generation ago.

    Brown vetoed the death penalty bill while he was governor from 1974 to 1982, but was overridden by the Legislature at the time. He also appointed state Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird, who was removed by voters in 1986 for her anti-death penalty rulings.

    But the issue has long since been decided, he told reporters after addressing the California Law Enforcement Alliance's 17th annual Law Enforcement Legislative Day conference in Sacramento.

    "This is the law. People have voted on it, the Legislature has voted on it. The California Supreme Court has upheld it not once, but dozens of times. So I would uphold that law like I would any other law in California," said Brown, who's considering another run for governor in 2010.

    California executions have been on hold since February 2006 because of challenges to the way the state carries out the procedure using a mixture of three drugs. The state is developing new regulations it says would allow for humane executions.

    Even when executions are allowed, Brown noted, California rarely carries out the death penalty. He said he has not studied proposals to speed up executions.

    "I know there are people making proposals, and I'd have to see what they were," Brown said. "It's definitely, you know, it's part of the landscape but it's not free of problems and it's not cheap."

    California's death row population stands at 667 inmates. California's Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice found last year that it costs more than $60 million annually, or about $90,000 extra for each condemned inmate. There are also higher costs for trials, appeals and incarceration.

    http://www.kcra.com/politics/18911454/detail.html

  3. #13
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    May 2, 2009

    Californians get look at state's revised execution procedures

    State prison officials on Friday published revised plans for executing condemned inmates in a detailed manual they believe will withstand constitutional challenges and allow them to resume lethal injection beginning with Stockton's Michael Angelo Morales.

    California citizens now have two months to comment on the state's lethal injection procedure in a time period that ends with a June 30 public hearing in Sacramento.

    The 42-page document describes the countdown for a death row inmate starting at 45 days up to being strapped to a gurney and injected with three lethal drugs.

    It details things such as the execution team's training regimen, record keeping and the inmate's last meal.

    Attorneys for Morales, 49, forced the state into the open-hearing process, prevailing in a Marin County courtroom on arguments that prison officials had changed their lethal injection procedure in 2007 without allowing comment.

    Under the arcane Administrative Procedures Act, some 300 California agencies - including the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation - have to consider public input on a regulation change before adopting it.

    State officials said the comment period for lethal injection focuses on the regulation change and not the morality of capital punishment.

    Morales' lead attorney, David Senior of Los Angeles, said Friday that he had not yet read the newly published manual, but he is already skeptical.

    "I'm curious as to how it is different from what it used to be," Senior said. "Or is it just more of the same, which is what seems to be the path they've taken so far?"

    Morales was steps from the death chamber in 2006 when his attorneys won an indefinite delay, arguing California's use of lethal injection threatened to violate his constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

    Attorneys also filed the lawsuit in Marin County for Morales, who was sentenced to death at San Quentin State Prison for the 1981 rape and murder of 17-year-old Stockton teen Terri Lynn Winchell.

    The revised procedure doesn't make radical changes to a May 2007 execution procedure. Rather, it addresses problems Morales' attorneys revealed in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who ruled the system was "broken."

    Morales' case has blocked any further executions in California, which has 680 inmates on death row. About a dozen of them were convicted for crimes in San Joaquin County.

    Corrections spokesman Seth Unger said that more than anything, publishing the regulations satisfies a procedural requirement toward resuming lethal injection. California uses a method like Kentucky's, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last year, he said.

    "Our ultimate goal is to carry out the will of the people in the most expeditious way as possible," he said. "Too many condemned inmates are sitting on death row longer than their victims are on this Earth."

    http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090502/A_NEWS/905020321/-1/rss02

  4. #14
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    California unveils new execution plan for public review

    California prison officials have developed a new lethal injection procedure for public review, hoping to end the legal impasse over the state's method of executing condemned inmates.

    In a 42-page proposal released on Friday, the state has outlined what it considers execution procedures that can pass legal muster and allow prison officials to resume executions on California's death row, where there are now about 680 condemned murderers awaiting death by lethal injection.

    The new guidelines set out specific requirements for the qualifications of execution team members, and various preparation stages in the months and weeks leading up to executions. One key provision during an execution provides for prison officials to determine if an inmate is unconscious from sedatives prior to receiving the final two doses of drugs; critics have argued that inmates can endure excruciating pain from the second drug, pancurium bromide, if not fully unconscious.

    San Quentin also has completed a new lethal injection chamber to replace the prison's antiquated death chamber.

    The new procedures are the latest attempt by the Schwarzenegger administration to restart capital punishment, which has been on hold since early 2007 because of legal challenges to the lethal injection method.

    Prison officials are seeking public comment on the procedures, and plan to hold a public hearing on June 30 to address any objections to the plan. The state has opened up the process for public review after an appeals court last year found the previous effort to revise the execution system failed to comply with state administrative rules because it was devised in secrecy.

    If the state approves the new lethal injection method, there is still likely to be extensive delay before executions resume. The new procedures would first have to be reviewed by San Jose U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who 2 years ago found the lethal injection procedures "broken'' and invited state officials to craft improvements to ensure inmates are executed humanely. Fogel is presiding over the ongoing legal challenge over lethal injection, and would have to evaluate whether changes to the procedure have addressed his concerns about flaws in the system. Fogel's decision is certain to be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Death row inmate Michael Morales challenged the legal injection method before his scheduled February 2007 execution for the 1981 slaying of a Lodi girl, arguing that the fatal three-drug cocktail administered by prison officials exposes inmates to the possibility of a cruel and painful death. Fogel put the execution on hold while he considers the issue, which has cropped up in courts around the country.

    John Grele, one of Morales' lawyers, said Monday he had not reviewed the newly-released procedures yet to determine if they are much different than what was proposed last year.

    "Obviously, that's one of the things to look at, to see what, if any changes, they have made,'' Grele said.

    (Source: The Mercury News)

  5. #15
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    Governor approves new San Quentin death row

    Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has given the go-ahead for construction of a new death row at San Quentin State Prison by vetoing legislative restrictions, an action that a Marin County lawmaker called both unwise and illegal.

    While announcing $489 million in cuts Tuesday from the state's 2009-10 budget, Schwarzenegger said he was saving additional, unspecified amounts by rejecting language added to the budget that would have delayed the death row project.

    Legislators approved $356 million last year for a 768-cell housing unit for condemned prisoners, tentatively scheduled to open in late 2011. It would replace a section of the 150-year-old prison that now holds nearly 670 inmates, the nation's largest death row.

    In a critical June 2008 report, the state auditor's office predicted a $39 million cost overrun and questioned the state's plans to place two inmates in each cell.

    California double-cells inmates in some lower-security prisons but hasn't done so on death row. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation plans to double-cell as many as 2/3 of the prisoners in the new San Quentin section.

    Without double-celling, the auditor's report said, the new death row will be filled to capacity in 2014. But the report said double-celling raises concerns of safety and privacy, and that a survey found that only 1 other state, Oklahoma, double-cells condemned prisoners.

    The budget that legislators sent to Schwarzenegger would have prohibited construction of the new death row until the state determined, in a court ruling or a formal opinion from the attorney general, that it would be allowed to double-cell death row inmates.

    Another budget provision would have blocked the project until the state resolved a lawsuit over prison overcrowding. The suit is pending before a panel of 3 federal judges in San Francisco, who have ruled that overcrowding is the chief cause of poor health care in state prisons.

    The judges have tentatively ordered the release of as many as 58,000 inmates to local custody, treatment programs or parole.

    Schwarzenegger has said he would appeal any such ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    In Tuesday's veto message, the Republican governor said removing restrictions on building the new death row is within his constitutional authority to cut state spending.

    "Having to delay the construction start to comply with these conditions will cause unnecessary increased costs," Schwarzenegger said.

    Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, an opponent of the death row project, said the veto guarantees a lawsuit that the state is likely to lose.

    Huffman co-sponsored the budget restrictions with state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. He said the governor's line-item veto power, which allows him to reduce appropriations in spending bills, doesn't authorize removing legislative restrictions on state projects.

    Huffman also predicted courts would reject any plan to double-cell death row prisoners.

    "The Department of Corrections and the governor apparently want to roll the dice," Huffman said. "I think they've set themselves up for another round of losing litigation."

    (Source: The San Francisco Chronicle)

  6. #16
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    December 14, 2009

    Candidate hopeful death penalty will dominate AG race

    By Rebecca Kimitch
    The Whittier Daily News

    The future of the death penalty in California could dominate the race for attorney general, or so hopes Republican candidate Tom Harman.

    "The race could become a referendum on the death penalty," Harman said Monday.

    Harman's prediction is based on San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee in the race, a result he wants.

    Harris opposes the death penalty, while Harman supports it.

    Harris calls it a "flawed system" but says as attorney general she would uphold state law.

    Harman, a state senator representing much of Orange County's coastline, is the only Republican in the race so far. He faces a field of six Democrats, including Harris; former Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo; three Democratic assemblymen - Ted Lieu, Alberto Torrico and Pedro Nava; and Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer for Facebook.com.

    As district attorney, Harris has never sought the death penalty, including a high-profile case against a man convicted of killing a police officer.

    "That is unusual for a district attorney ... she brings that baggage to this race," Harman said.

    Harris' campaign manager Brian Brokaw said four of the last nine attorney generals, including Jerry Brown, share her stance on the death penalty. They are personally opposed, but uphold the law.

    Brokaw doubts the death penalty will be an issue in the race.

    If you ask voters what their top concerns are, they are much more interested in how you are going to reduce violent crime, how you are going to solve the prison crisis, how you are going to tackle financial crimes - issues that affect Californians in their everyday lives," he said.

    But Harman is hopeful the issue will resonate with voters, because the majority of Californians support the death penalty. He is also hopeful that law enforcement agencies will give him their support over the issue, though he acknowledges that Harris' position as a district attorney has already won her key public safety endorsements.

    Harris has been endorsed by former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon, and San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne.

    http://www.whittierdailynews.com/ci_13998300?source=rss

  7. #17
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    January 5, 2010

    State proposes lethal injection revisions, a step toward resuming executions

    The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation today released its proposed revisions to the lethal injection procedures, a first step toward resuming executions in the state after a four-year halt.

    The proposals kick off a new 15-day period for public comment, after which the revised procedures can be adopted and submitted for what is expected to be months of judicial review in state and federal courts to assess the execution method's conformance with state law and the Constitution.

    Executions have been on hold since early 2006, when concerns about the state's three-drug method prompted U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose to deem the process a potentially unconstitutional infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.

    Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tasked a special panel with rewriting the lethal injection procedures in 2007, but the revisions were decided behind closed doors and later ruled illegal by a Marin County judge for the state's failure to submit the changes to public scrutiny and comment.

    Corrections officials last year sought the public's input in May and June, receiving more than 8,000 comments by letter, e-mail and at a public hearing in Sacramento. Analysis of those suggestions resulted in a few minor changes to the protocols, mostly dealing with the arrangements for witnesses to executions and access to the condemned inmate by chaplains and spiritual advisors. As under the previous practices, an inmate sentenced to death can choose whether to be executed by lethal gas or lethal injection.

    Once the lethal injection protocols are formally adopted by the corrections department, both the Marin County judge and Fogel must review and approve them before executions can resume.

    California has 697 inmates on death row, but only six are known to have cleared all legal hurdles to their execution.

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/state-of-california-proposes-lethal-injection-revisions-first-step-to-resuming-executions.html

  8. #18
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    Alternate public defenders office OK'd to handle Riverside County capital cases

    Riverside County supervisors this week approved a plan to create an alternate public defender's office to handle only death-penalty cases.

    The goal of the office, which will cost about $3.5 million a year, is to reduce the number of cases in which the county must hire more expensive private attorneys to provide the criminal defense, Assistant Public Defender Robert Willey said Thursday.

    Under the new proposal, the county could save as much as $1 million a year over the way death-penalty trials are now handled, he said.

    "I am hoping people will realize that these are cases that the taxpayer is already paying to defend and they are paying more to defend," Willey said.

    The Board of Supervisors, which approved the plan in concept on a 4-0 vote Tuesday, has not yet committed funding for the program. Supervisor John Tavaglione was absent from the vote.

    San Diego and Los Angeles counties have had similar alternate public defender's offices since 1990 and 1998, respectively.

    Death-penalty cases are the most expensive to prosecute and defend. Riverside County has 46 pending.

    The law requires that death-penalty cases have two defense attorneys. Costs to investigate the cases are higher, Willey said.

    Currently, the public defender's office handles death-penalty cases for defendants who cannot pay for their own attorneys. When the office has a legal or ethical conflict of interest, those cases go to private attorneys the county has under contract.

    But those firms generally take no more than three death-penalty cases a year. Any cases beyond that have to go to other outside attorneys.

    Conflicts arise when the public defender's office also represents a potential witness in a capital case or when there are multiple defendants.

    Since it will handle only death-penalty trials, the alternate public defender's office will exist behind an "ethical wall" and will be the first place those cases are assigned, Willey said.

    That will eliminate many of the conflicts of interest that arise from witnesses, he said. The main office would handle any cases that arise from a co-defendant conflict of interest. And the private defense lawyers already under contract could handle the remaining, Willey said.

    The alternate public defender's office initially will take up to eight death-penalty cases a year. The public defender's office will shift over its existing capital cases unit, consisting of six attorneys, to staff the new office, Willey said.

    Willey said the real savings will come from investigations and expert witnesses. The new office will cover all those costs, he said.

    All told, Willey said the county should be able to save between $70,000 and $80,000 per case with the alternate public defender's office.

    In addition, Willey said the new office would "help get these cases to trial faster and resolved faster so everybody can begin the process of healing faster."

    Assistant District Attorney Bill Mitchell said Thursday that private attorneys have other clients and scheduling conflicts. Defense attorneys handling only capital cases will have more time to prepare, he said.

    "There is no reason why a capital case has to take two, three years to prosecute," he said. "I support any measure that will be cheaper for the county and move the cases along quicker."

    http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_W_defender26.4157e36.html

  9. #19
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    March 13, 2010

    The public speaks about lethal injection

    Judge orders review of the process, and 13,000 respond with comments

    When a federal judge halted the execution of a man convicted in the brutal rape and murder of a Tokay High School student, he set in motion a string of procedural changes.

    California's process of lethal injection needed an overview, he ruled, in order to avoid possible violations of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So the state's prison officials began revamping things before setting a new execution date for Michael Morales, convicted in the death of 17-year-old Terri Lynn Winchell.

    Along the way, the public was allowed to weigh in — to the tune of 13,000 comments in January.

    "The response is unprecedented," said Timothy Lockwood, chief of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's regulation and policy management branch. "It's certainly unprecedented in the history of the CDCR, and our records go back to 1968."

    Lockwood, to whom all 13,000 comments were addressed, was on the receiving end of many extreme responses.

    Like many others, he didn't actually address the actual policy changes. The proposal, which details every step leading up to an execution, is quite long. The latest changes were detailed in 25 pages, available to the public on the CDCR's Web site.

    "Disgusting to read all of this. What is the matter with all of you behind this report and with the state of California?" wrote Tom Hyde, of Naperville, Ill.

    No matter how strong or irrelevant the responses, all are stored in Lockwood's office on the eastern edge of Sacramento near Highway 50. The nondescript building holds numerous cubicles where employees oversee the rules affecting inmates, family members and correctional officers.

    Because the lethal injection revision affects the citizens, the matter had to be presented to the public, just as with any other law. The public was allowed to send comments on the proposal, and last year prison officials also held a public hearing.

    Corrections officials must respond to those public statements by including responses in a large packet that is ultimately sent to the state's Office of Administrative Law. That office is comprised of attorneys who review the proposals for six legal standards: necessity, consistency, clarity, non-duplication, authority and reference.

    While the lethal injection procedure has made international news, it's just one of the annual 700-800 regulation proposals that go through the Office of Administrative Law, said the agency's director, Susan Lapsley.

    And, though the amount of public comment is new territory for corrections officials, Lapsley said her office often sees even bigger packets for one single proposal. Global warming and greenhouse gas laws generate "boxes upon boxes of public comments and technical documents," Lapsley said.

    Once a proposed law change reaches her office, staff has 30 days to review the proposal. If the proposed policy passes muster, it is filed with the Secretary of State and becomes law within 30 days. If the policy has problems, Lapsley's office sends it back to the department that created the law, noting what is wrong.

    The process was created in part to make sure regulations were actually legal, and also to provide another set of eyes to avoid things like typos, Lapsley said. The director of the Office of Administrative Law is appointed by the governor and approved by the senate, so the office is independent of the agencies trying to make the changes.

    More than 200 state agencies must go through the same routine when they make small regulatory changes.

    These proposals include everything from quarantine areas for pests to auto repair regulations. If hunting area boundaries need to be even slightly changed due to population growth, that has to go through the same process. If the Department of Consumer Affairs wants to make one minor change to nail salon procedures, they too go through the same routine.

    Prison officials go through the law change process regularly — roughly 20 a year. Most comments come from inmates and their family members.

    For instance, a recent regulation involved increasing the allowance inmates may spend monthly from $180 to $220, due to inflation rates. Because that matter affected the public, it went through the same comment process.

    Unlike the lethal injection matter, nobody objected.

    http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2010/03/13/news/5a_injection_100313.txt

    ************************************************** *******************


    Voices, opinions on California's lethal injection proposal

    When the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation set out to revamp its lethal injection procedure to clear up legal concerns, the public was invited to comment.

    This January, responses came from around the world. The following is a summary of some of those 13,000 comments received by prison officials.

    * * *

    Thousands of comments were based on a general form letter that addressed three or four points. These letters came from Mississippi, Seattle, San Diego, Belgium and by fax from Vienna, Austria. Their four concerns were:

    # Females, who are housed at a women's prison, will be transported to the death chamber up to six hours before the scheduled execution. Opponents argued for more time, because those hours are critical for attorney and family meetings.

    # Witnesses don't get equal treatment. Victims' family members get unlimited seating, with overflow allowed to view the execution from a remote location by a video feed. The inmate is restricted to five witnesses.

    # Chaplains and spiritual advisers aren't clearly defined. A state-paid chaplain may be with the inmate for the last five days, while a private "spiritual adviser" is only allowed the last six hours. The private adviser must be approved by the warden, but there are no guidelines regarding who is acceptable.

    # While the new protocol sticks to the same three-drug formula California has previously used, Ohio has since used a single anesthetic to avoid possible complications. The three-drug method came under scrutiny because there is no guarantee that an inmate is completely unconscious before two other drugs are administered, and they could be extremely painful, thus violating the Constitution.

    That last point is what Sen. Tom Harman has addressed in proposed legislation that is expected to be heard in a Senate public safety committee next month.

    Harman, who also submitted a letter to prison officials, proposed that California follow Ohio's example and simply use one anesthetic.

    "Every hospital, every surgery suite uses it," the Republican Huntington Beach resident said in a phone interview. "It's a common anesthetic; you give it to the person and there's no pain. If you increase the dosage, it becomes fatal."

    He noted that Ohio's supreme court ruled the drug constitutional, and that there have been no problems with it.

    "Why reinvent the wheel when this works?" he said.

    Harman acknowledged that his proposal would mean having to restart the law change process, but he said it would ultimately clear up the matter permanently.

    * * *

    Some people had personal experiences with executions.

    # Elk Grove resident Bill Babbitt witnessed the May 4, 1999, execution of his brother, who was convicted of murdering an elderly South Sacramento woman. Babbitt actually turned his brother in to police, and he felt everyone should be treated fairly, including witnesses to executions.

    "When I witnessed my brother's execution, I was forced to stand on the riser because no seating was provided, though seating was provided for the victim's witnesses. Witnessing an execution is difficult, even traumatic, for any witnesses, and seats should be provided for all, especially the elderly and infirm," he wrote. "Families of the executed are innocent people going through an intensely traumatic experience, and all care must be taken to address the harm they suffer."

    # Bud Welch, of Oklahoma City, was the father of Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Welch serves as board president of the group Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, of which Babbitt is also a member.

    "Timothy McVeigh's execution did not bring me any peace, and I don't believe the death penalty is the best we can do for victims or the best we can do as a society," he wrote.

    Regarding California's proposal, Welch had concerns about a public address system inside the execution chamber. It will be turned off after the inmate's final statement, which Welch felt is wrong because there will be no way of knowing if the inmate cries out in pain or if any of the execution team members say anything.

    * * *

    While the majority of letter writers were against the entire death penalty law, a few wrote to support it.

    # Andrew Arko, a self-described California native and resident, faxed a letter in which he said the death penalty helps negotiate plea deals. His brother is a hostage negotiator and said it's a useful bargaining chip.

    He also expressed doubts that the process could cause pain: "Anybody who has had an operation and has been put under, knows you don't feel anything."

    # Joseph Juden, who lives in Southern California, suggested using an oxygen chamber and simply removing the air. He said he had altitude training in the Navy, in which he was placed in an oxygen chamber, given a mask and then given a task to complete while oxygen was sucked out of the chamber, to simulate air at 30,000- feet altitude.

    "My recollection was that I did very well on the task. In reality, I did very little, almost nothing. Suddenly, I had my mask on, but did not know how it got there. Had someone not replaced it quickly, I would have been dead. I can attest that there is absolutely no pain, nor any indication of anything wrong," he wrote.

    * * *

    Though many people simply expressed their opinions on the death penalty, some did address the actual policy change.

    # Death row inmate William Dennis focused on a part of the protocol that says an inmate will be in waist restraints while having his last visits. In prison since 1988 for a murder four years earlier, Dennis argued that the warden should be allowed to determine whether the restraints are necessary.

    "It is a trying time as it is for family members to have to meet an inmate at this late date, but to compound the mental anguish seeing a love one tied up in waist chains isn't needed," he wrote in a typed letter from San Quentin, home for all male death row inmates.

    # Inmate Barry Williams, on death row for a March 1982 crime, asked that cameras be installed in the death chamber so that the public may "bear witness to these actions."

    He also asked that inmates be allowed to see a chaplain from the private sector: "A state employed chaplain has not reached true spiritual development to assist human beings in ascension and divine revelation. Otherwise he/she would not be going along with the taking of human life."

    # The spiritual adviser was also at issue for 36-year-old Richard Valdez, on death row for an April 1995 gang crime in which five people were killed.

    As a "practitioner of the Native American Faith," Valdez said he will need a sweat lodge, pipe ceremony and smudging before his execution, and that the new proposal doesn't take that into consideration.

    He also asked for more seating because his "extremely large" family won't fit into five seats allowed for an inmate's family.

    Viewer seating was one of several points addressed by many writers. The proposed law allows five seats for the inmate's family, while the victims' family members have more seats and may also view it by television feed from a remote location.

    # Regarding witnesses, 24-year death row inmate Barry Williams wants cameras in the death chamber to record the process. "It is highly contradictory to the interest of the people for the state to kill in its name and not allow the people to bear witness to these actions," he wrote.

    * * *

    Some writers picked out minute things to address.

    # Alice Schaffer Smith, a Palo Alto attorney, noted a few grammatical and typographical errors, including one instance that "contains the word "he" and thus is not sex-neutral."

    # Death row inmate Douglas Scott Mickey wrote one full page and focused only on female prisoners, and the issue of when they should be transported to the execution chamber. His solution: 48 hours before the scheduled death, rather than six hours.

    * * *

    Some comments merely discussed capital punishment, sometimes in rather blunt terms.

    # On a postcard featuring a photo of the Pacific Ocean and a Salinas postmark, the anonymous writer briefly expressed views on the death penalty, including: "Do away with it!!"

    # "The DA's office says no one has the right to take another human being life. Only God. ... Your (sic) not in any way God and God did not in any way give you or any one else permission to take another life," San Quentin inmate Eloy Loy handwrote in cursive. "The state of California has the balls to use the excuse well it's not us, it's the voters ... if the people of California tell you and everyone else in Sacramento to shoot yourself in the head because they voted for it, are you going to do it? No. Bottom line, it's stupid, dumb. All this death penalty is nothing but revenge."

    Convicted in Los Angeles for a May 1996 crime, Loy said in his five-page letter that he is innocent, and knows at least one other innocent man on death row.

    # Kevin Cooper, convicted of four murders in the Chino Hills area, expressed frustration that the procedure didn't seem to have changed much. His execution was halted three hours, 42 minutes before it had been scheduled, in order to do more DNA testing.

    He wrote in a typed letter from San Quentin that the new policy doesn't seem to "make the process any more humane, to violate our rights any less."

    # Fellow inmate Stevie Lamar Fields, who has been on death row since August 1979, also thought the new procedure only had "minor" changes. "You people are 'minor' indeed! Change the real problem, lethal injection!" he wrote.

    * * *

    Among the well-known names was actor Mike Farrell, who also used the form letter so many had sent. He also added his own concur for the mental well-being of those tasked with carrying out the "ritualized killing process."

    "Even the Nazis recognized what they called 'the burdening of the soul' of those charged with taking the lives of their victims," wrote Farrell, who has attended multiple anti-death penalty rallies at San Quentin.

    * * *

    More than 10,000 comments were the result of a form letter online. Senders filled out a few basic fields, such as name and address, then clicked "submit your comment" to send an e-mail to the state. It automatically sent the 223-word letter to state officials.

    The campaign focused on the cost of the death penalty, including years of appeals, with the slogan, "California can't afford the death penalty."

    http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2010/03/13/news/5b_injection_100313.txt

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