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| California brand new death chamber |
Some victims' families say it is time to restart executions in California after an 8-year moratorium - but others disagree.
Campaigners in California are calling on the state's government to resume executions on America's biggest death row.
More than 740 inmates live under the threat of death by lethal injection in a state that has not executed anyone for more than 8 years.
California placed a moratorium on executions in 2006 over concerns about the cocktail of drugs used and earlier this year a federal judge declared the administration of it as "dysfunctional".
Judge Cormac Carney said keeping prisoners waiting for decades represented cruel and unusual punishment, a breach of the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment.
He wrote: "In California, the execution of a death sentence is so infrequent and the delays preceding it so extraordinary that the death penalty is deprived of any deterrent or retributive effect it might once have had."
It is estimated that the death penalty has cost the state more than $4bn since it was re-introduced in 1976.
Since then, just 13 inmates have been put to death.
Across America, opinion is divided on the death penalty.
Some states have abolished it, while others have experienced shortages of execution drugs and botched procedures.
This week the execution of a man said to be mentally ill in Texas was put on hold.
But some victims' families say it is time to restart the executions in California.
American football legend Kermit Alexander's mother, sister and two nephews were murdered by a gang member who had gone to the wrong address in Los Angeles.
He remains on death row, 30 years after the killing.
Alexander is now leading the campaign to resume executions.
He told Sky News: "They won't allow me to do it so if society has it on the books they have to get it done.
"Don't make us suffer the anguish of waiting to see if it is going happen.
"I'm saddened because we can't get on with our lives because this is in the back of our minds. Our family has been badly mauled."
Lorrain Taylor, whose twin sons were murdered in a drive-by shooting in Oakland, disagrees.
She runs a support group for the family of murder victims and said: "Why use money to take another person's life - eventually, if it ever happens - when you can use those same funds to help law enforcement to stop violence, to provide counselling for children who are left behind.
"To me it makes no sense, I think that it is also an act of violence and it is sending the wrong message."
She agrees with this warning from Shujaa Graham, who spent 10 years on death row for a murder he did not commit.
He told Sky News: "Why do we kill someone to prove that killing is wrong - and we say life is the most sacred thing?"
Source: Sky News, December 7, 2014
Families of California crime victims demand faster executions
Executions temporarily halted in 2006, leaving death row prisoners in limbo
Crime victims groups in California are demanding that the execution of death row inmates be accelerated, after an 8-year moratorium on lethal injections.
California halted executions in 2006, after concerns about the cocktail of drugs used.
Earlier this year, Judge Cormac Carney ruled that keeping prisoners waiting, in some cases for decades, on death row constituted a cruel and unusual punishment, and the death sentence was thus unconstitutional.
"For most, systemic delay has made their execution so unlikely that the death sentence ... has been quietly transformed into one no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death," wrote Judge Carney.
"As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have languished for so long on Death Row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose."
Governor Jerry Brown recently changed state regulations to allow single drug executions, in an attempt to sidestep concerns about the efficacy of triple-drug cocktails.
The Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation is suing state officials for taking too long to adopt single-drug execution procedures.
However, the California corrections department says that a shortage of execution drugs was making the adoption of the new procedure difficult.
The backlog of executions is not limited to California, with only 1% of the 3,000 condemned inmates in the US put to death annually.
Experts say that lengthy legal procedures and growing concerns about the drugs used for lethal injections are behind the delay, with lawyers appealing thousands of death sentences after a series of high-profile botched executions.
Source: IB Times, December 7, 2014
