WILL SEASONS CHANGE? I’M WAITING

The madness surrounding murder and the death penalty in California

By Richard Krupp, PhD

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 11, 2015

An Orange County man who freely admitted murdering eight people is still awaiting sentencing about four years after his killing spree. Even if/when he is sentenced to death, the execution may take years or may not even happen at all due to a laborious legal system, special interest groups, and political obstructionists.

Is there an end to the madness in sight?

Over the years California has had a changing relationship with the death penalty. The fluctuations have occurred primarily in the judicial system; sometimes embracing, while other times rejecting, death sentences for murderers.

Are the seasons changing?

The Sacramento Bee had an interesting story about this subject recently:

Is capital punishment dead in California?

Clarence Ray Allen was the 13th man to die in San Quentin’s death chamber since California resumed executing inmates in 1992.

His Jan. 17, 2006, execution was also the last one conducted in this state. Since then, 52 other death row residents have died of old age, suicide or natural causes, but not one has made the short walk from the pre-execution holding cell to the $835,000 lethal injection chamber that was completed in 2010 but never used.

And it’s uncertain if they ever will, despite the state’s announcement last week that it will develop a new drug formula for putting people to death. Today, California has 750 condemned prisoners – up from 646 after Allen, 76, was killed.

Legal challenges and a shortage of the three drugs used in the state’s current execution formula have kept anyone from being executed since Allen. But death penalty advocates who sued in Sacramento Superior Court in 2014 won a critical settlement last week when the state agreed to develop a new method for lethal injection executions that would use just one drug.

The state said it would develop the one-drug policy this year, leading death penalty advocates to predict the executions eventually will resume. Currently, 17 inmates on death row are believed to have exhausted all appeals and be eligible for execution. But the state lacks a court-approved way to kill them.

In December 2006, after a federal judge ruled that the state’s three-drug execution protocol risked causing pain to an inmate that would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” the state began preparing changes to make its injection procedures meet judicial approval. (for full story read http://tinyurl.com/nbrcx7e.)

I’m not sure what kind of thought process is involved in showing such concern for the comfort of the soon to be deceased murderer. How would someone even know how it feels to be executed by lethal injection?

Have any executed inmates returned from the dead to speak about the pain they suffered? Why does anyone even care? Opponents keep trying to have the death penalty eliminated by the California voters without success. Will the will of the people change like the seasons?

Of course murderer-supporters have had more luck with sympathetic judges. How long will this present obstacle block executions?

I haven’t heard the anti-death penalty advocates address the families of the victims.

Why are they more interested in the criminals than the victims? This is something I will never comprehend.

What would a “court-approved way to kill” require? Does execution have to be comfortable? Pleasant? By that court-approved standard, perhaps the condemned need not be aware they had drifted into the afterlife.

I’m sure some court somewhere can come up with something. I’ve been waiting for the season to change. The season for death penalty delays and obstacles needs to end.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here it is June of 2015 and the State of California has yet to resolve the absurd ruling in December 2006 of a federal judge that the state’s three-drug execution protocol risked causing pain to an inmate that would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment. Nearly 10 years ago the state began preparing to present an execution process that would be acceptable to the courts.

Nearly 10 years? Even though a majority of Californians support capital punishment, it is obvious that the state has no appetite to execute anyone. From the June 5 Sacramento Bee:

But death penalty advocates who sued in Sacramento Superior Court in 2014 won a critical settlement last week when the state agreed to develop a new method for lethal injection executions that would use just one drug.

The state said it would develop the one-drug policy this year, leading death penalty advocates to predict the executions eventually will resume.

Texas has been merrily topping the condemned with a single injection dose of pentobarbital. Shortly after the injection, the condemned snort a few times before falling asleep like a baby. So it shouldn’t take California more than 10 minutes to come up with a single execution drug protocol. But with all the legal challenges yet to come, the death penalty is all but dead in California.