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San Quentin's brand new
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SACRAMENTO, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- A resumption of executions in California would see an unprecedented number of inmates facing death by lethal injection, authorities said.
After almost six years of a moratorium on executions, the number of death row inmates who have exhausted all legal appeals has grown to a dozen who could be executed in just a few months if legal challenges to the state's lethal injection method fail, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reported Sunday.
The possibility of so many executions in a short period would bring the death penalty debate in California to the fore, foes of capital punishment said.
"If California were to begin executing at the rate of other states, it seems like people would care about the issue more one way or another," said former California Department of Corrections chief and San Quentin Warden Jeanne Woodford, now executive director of a major anti-death penalty group. "It is kind of abstract at this moment."
The lethal injection challenge has languished in the federal courts but may get a hearing early next year, officials said.
California's execution machine could crank up
Amid renewed efforts to repeal California's death penalty and nearly six years into a de facto moratorium on executions, San Quentin's death row has quietly piled up an unprecedented number of inmates who have exhausted their legal appeals and would face imminent death by lethal injection if the state resumes carrying out the ultimate punishment.
At least a dozen inmates could be executed in a span of a few months if an oft-stalled legal challenge to the state's lethal injection method is resolved, roughly the same number of condemned murderers California has put to death in more than three decades of capital punishment.
A Bay Area News Group review shows 12 death row inmates have been turned away in their appeals all the way through the U.S. Supreme Court, generally considered the final stage in the lengthy death penalty review process. At least two other inmates have lost their appeals through the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordinarily is the last, best hope to overturn a death sentence, while others are awaiting rulings from that court.
Experts say there could be a variety of reactions and results if California becomes a state that regularly carries out executions, including further strains on the legal system. Ohio's state Supreme Court, faced with a similar rush a few years ago, has now scheduled one execution per month through 2013 to pace the process. In California, prosecutors would need to turn to judges in their counties to secure execution dates for each inmate, a scattered process that could take months or longer to unfold.
In addition, Gov. Jerry Brown and his approach to the death penalty would be quickly tested in a string of clemency requests; no California governor has commuted a death sentence in the modern death penalty era.
