Death Penalty
December 26, 2011
California executions remain in everlasting limbo
As California nears its sixth year without an execution, state officials find themselves once again grappling with a judge's order that concludes they've botched crafting a new and legal method of putting condemned killers to death by lethal injection.
For the third time during the six-year moratorium on executions, a judge has ordered the state back to square one in creating new lethal injection procedures. The development all but ensures San Quentin's death chamber will remain dormant until at least well into 2013.
The timing could be important: The issue will draw heightened debate next year against the backdrop of a ballot measure designed to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole...
LINK - MercuryNews.com
December 19, 2011
California’s new lethal injection protocol tossed by judge
A judge on Friday threw out California's new lethal injection protocols, which have been five years in the making, because corrections officials failed to consider a one-drug execution method now in practice in other death penalty states.
In ruling that the new protocols were "invalid," Marin County Superior Court Judge Faye D'Opal noted that one of the state's own experts recommended the single injection method as being superior to the three-drug sequence approved last year...
LINK - LATimes.com
December 15, 2011
Judge plans on tossing California’s lethal injection procedures
A Marin County judge will decide Friday whether to finalize her decision to toss out California's new lethal injection procedures after she ruled prison officials failed to properly adopt them.
In a tentative ruling Thursday, Marin County Superior Court Judge Faye D'Opal found prison officials failed to properly consider a one-drug alternative to the three-drug lethal injection mixture used to execute inmates.
Attorneys representing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will get a chance to change the judge's mind during a hearing Friday morning...
LINK - SacBee.com
August 26, 2011
“Legislature shies away from criminal justice reform”
If yesterday's news is any indication, the legislature is not looking to make any big leaps towards reversing California's tough sentencing laws any time soon. Two reform bills met their end (or at least major roadblocks) yesterday: Senator Loni Hancock's effort to end the death penalty, and Senator Leland Yee's ongoing attempt to allow the possibility of parole to inmates who were sentenced to life in prison as children.
In a statement, Hancock said she withdrew her bill, which would have been a first step towards ending the death penalty in California, because “the votes were not there...”
LINK - KALWNews.org
August 22, 2011
Academic urges speedy appeals process in death penalty cases
Justice is expensive.
Once a sentencing jury recommends death or life in prison in a capital murder conviction in California, the appeals begin. The first appeal is to the state Supreme Court, but the prolonged appellate process may continue for years with the filing of habeas corpus petitions and appeals to the federal courts...
LINK - VCStar.com
August 18, 2011
Inmate faces death penalty for killing fellow inmate
The San Jose man was already in San Quentin serving a life sentence for murdering a homeless man in Willow Glen. Now he faces a spot on death row for allegedly killing a fellow inmate who was himself a murderer.
Marin County prosecutors on Wednesday announced they will seek the death penalty against Frank Souza, 31, who has been charged with fatally stabbing fellow San Quentin inmate Edward Schaefer...
LINK - MercuryNews.com
July 7, 2011
Calif. lawmakers advance bill to end death penalty
A bill that seeks to abolish California's death penalty advanced Thursday after its first legislative hearing with support from the author of the state's death penalty and a former warden who presided over executions.
Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, said she introduced the bill because California can no longer afford a capital punishment system that is both expensive and ineffective as it battles persistent multi-billion dollar budget deficits.
If eventually signed into law, the bill would put the question before voters in 2012...
LINK - SFGate.com
May 12, 2011
Former CDCR Director Jeanne Woodford now head of anti-death penalty group
Former California prisons leader joins fight against death penalty Jeanne Woodford, the former director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who as warden at San Quentin reluctantly oversaw four executions, will become the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Focus...
LINK - LATimes.com
September 4, 2010
Third Hawaii inmate faces death penalty in Arizona
A third Hawaii inmate serving time in an Arizona prison faces the death penalty after allegedly killing a fellow inmate during an argument in June.
Mahina Uli Silva, 21, was indicted by a Pinal County grand jury yesterday for allegedly strangling his cellmate from Hawaii, Clifford Medina, 23, on June 8. Medina was found unresponsive in the cell he shared with Silva at Saguarao Correctional Center in Eloy, Ariz.
Clayton Frank, director of the state Department of Public Safety, said his office was informed of the indictment yesterday...
LINK - StarAdvertiser.com
June 10, 2010
State agency rejects Schwarzenegger’s latest death penalty plan
In an unexpected development, a state agency has rejected California's new methodology for putting condemned inmates to death by lethal injection, and has given corrections officials until Oct. 6 to resubmit their proposal.
The decision by the Office of Administrative Law came Tuesday in a 21-page "decision of disapproval of regulatory action" and is the latest setback for the Schwarzenegger administration's beleaguered effort to resume executions.
The obscure agency is part of the state's executive branch and is run by two people appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It "ensures that … regulations are clear, necessary, legally valid, and available to the public," according to its mission statement...
LINK - FresnoBee.com
April 29, 2009
Riverside County DA urges reform of death-penalty process
Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco called for overhauling the state's death-penalty system during a Capitol rally Wednesday for crime victims.
Pacheco, the keynote speaker at the 20th annual Victims March on the Capitol, criticized the years-long delays between when a criminal is sentenced to death and when the execution takes place.
Pacheco singled out the 1992 death sentence for Andrew Lamont Brown, of Riverside, for killing 17-year-old Christina Ann Ramirez, of Riverside, during a carjacking. Brown remains on death row.
"How has this animal not received justice?" Pacheco said, choking up. "He has been sitting on death row at our expense for $90,000 a year for 17 years…"
LINK - PE.com (Press-Enterprise)
March 12, 2009
U.S. Attorney General Agrees To Seek Death Penalty Against Valley Inmates
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has given prosecutors the go-ahead to seek the death penalty against two inmates, accused of killing a North Valley correctional officer.
Jose Sablan and James Guerrero are accused of killing 22-year-old officer Jose Rivera in June at a federal penitentiary in Atwater. The men allegedley stabbed Rivera to death in a housing part of the prison.
Rivera had been a federal correctional officer for less than a year at the time of his death…
LINK - KMPH.com Fox 25 Central San Joaquin Valley
February 23, 2009
Opinion: Death row futility
Thomas Francis Edwards died a week ago Saturday of natural causes at age 65. That may not sound strange until you consider that Edwards, the convicted killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl, had been on death row for 22 years.
That's right. Two decades later, the state of California still hadn't carried out a sentence imposed in the mid-1980s. And there's nothing unusual about that. Of the state's 680 death row inmates, 67 have been waiting to die for 25 years or more; nearly 300 have waited 15 years or more.
Today, a death row inmate is more likely to die of old age than to be put to death by the state. Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 43 have died of natural causes, five more of "other causes," 16 by suicide — and 14 have been executed, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation…
LINK - LATimes.com Opinion Story
January 8, 2009
Prosecutors, Cops and Judges: Ready to Ditch California’s Death Penalty
For Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin and former Director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it wasn't the years of delays in death penalty cases but the experience of actually carrying out executions that shaped her perspective. In October, the L.A. Times published Woodford's reflections:
As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?" We knew the answer: No…
LINKM - CaliforniaProgressReport.com
July 11, 2008
Death penalty’s survival uncertain, state finds
Some 71 years after the last hanging of an inmate at Folsom Prison, California's death penalty is fatally flawed, according to a state commission report.
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice was established in 2004 in part to determine the extent to which the state's legal system has caused wrongful executions. It reported June 30 that the state must narrow its death penalty, in part because the penalty is impossibly expensive to continue in its current broad form.
Under the statute now in effect, a full 87 percent of California's first-degree murders are "death eligible," and could be prosecuted as death cases, the commission noted. Any of a total of 22 "special circumstances" can be cited by local prosecutors in seeking a death penalty. The list includes drive-by murder. A federal Justice Department study in 2000 found numerous racial and geographic disparities applied to death penalty sentences…
LINK - EDHTelegraph.com (The El Dorado Hills Telegraph)
July 7, 2008
Court denies Salcido death penalty appeal
Ramon Salcido, the mass murderer who slit the throats of his own children and left a trail of blood across Sonoma Valley in 1989, was denied a death penalty appeal by the California Supreme Court on June 30. Salcido has been on death row at San Quentin since December 1990, and had appealed his sentence on several grounds, including the allegations that he was illegally extradited from Mexico and that he was high on cocaine and alcohol and suffering a psychotic break during the time of the killings.
Salcido went on a murderous rampage April 18, 1989, after allegedly learning he was not the biological father of one of his wife's four children. He murdered his wife, Angela Richards Salcido, 24, at their Boyes Hot Springs home after taking his three daughters, aged 4, 3, and 22 months, driving to the dump transfer station on Stage Gulch Road, slitting their throats and tossing them into a ditch. The 3-year-old, Carmina, miraculously survived. Salcido also killed his mother-in-law Marian Richards, two sisters-in-law whom he also raped, and Tracy Toovey, an assistant winemaker at Grand Cru Winery in Glen Ellen where the killer worked as a fork-lift operator. There he also shot and wounded Kenneth Butti, his supervisor at Grand Cru…
LINK - SonomaNews.com
March 25, 2008
US court questions legality of lethal injections
Capital punishment is back in the headlines in the United States, as the Supreme Court prepares to hand down a crucial ruling on the legality of lethal injections.
[…]
The Supreme Court is currently considering whether prisoners suffer pain during the lethal injection process. A growing number of doctors believe inmates do. Mr Givens had no medical training and yet he was expected to insert needles, mix drugs and perform complicated procedures. If a mistake is made, the inmate could be tortured to death…
LINK - ABC News
June 1, 2006
Race and the Decision to Seek the Death Penalty in Federal Cases
Introduction
In federal capital cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) in the district where the case is prosecuted makes an initial recommendation to seek or not to seek the death penalty for defendants who are charged with crimes that carry this penalty. The USAO sends its recommendation to the Attorney General’s Review Committee on Capital Cases (AGRC). The AGRC reviews the USAO’s recommendation and the case file, occasionally gathers additional information about the case, and makes a recommendation to the U.S. Attorney General (AG) about whether to seek the death penalty. The AG then makes the final decision.
