California: Inland juries vote for execution, but capital punishment is on hold

San Quentin's death chamber

Inland courts. But while jurors continue to recommend death, the sentences are effectively on hold while the protocols for California’s lethal injection procedures are under judicial review.

No executions have taken place in California since 2006, and there are no prospects for capital punishment to resume any time soon.

On Wednesday, Dec. 18 a Riverside County panel voted death for Robert Gonzales Castro for the 2008 killing of a Moreno Valley man over a stolen laptop computer.

On Thursday, Dec. 19, jurors in San Bernardino County recommended death for John Wayne Thomson, who killed a Lucerne Valley businessman, while a Riverside County jury voted the same fate for Jason Hann , who killed his two-month-old daughter in Desert Hot Springs.

All three will be sentenced early next year. Those who receive a formal death sentence will join the more than 740 inmates on California’s Death Row, including 80 from Riverside County and 40 from San Bernardino County. The two Inland counties combined account for nearly 16 percent of the state’s condemned prisoners.

Six of those already sent to San Quentin Prison in 2013 were from Riverside County, including Emrys John and Tyrone Miller, two of four ex-Marines convicted in the 2008 home-invasion attack on a Marine sergeant and his wife in French Valley in Southwest Riverside County.

One of the condemned is from San Bernardino County — Rickie Lee Fowler, convicted for the arson-murders of five men who died of heart attacks in the 2003 Old Fire in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Should current trends continue, they will most likely die of natural causes or suicide. Of the 104 condemned inmates who have died since 1978, 14 have been executed, 60 have died from natural causes, 22 committed suicide, and six from other causes, including being shot on the exercise yard and a drug overdose.

Some inmates, such as Albert Greenwood Brown from Riverside, who was convicted of murdering a schoolgirl in an orange grove and sentenced to die in 1982, have waited more than 30 years for their punishment.

Brown, along with Kevin Cooper, who was convicted of slaying two adults and two children inside a Chino Hills ranch home in a 1983 attack, are among those who state officials say have exhausted all their appeals.

One Death Row inmate from Riverside County, James Anderson, has been there since January 1979.

But their sentences are effectively on hold while the protocols for California’s lethal injection procedures are under judicial review. After the last execution in the state in 2006, a federal judge ruled that the state’s three-drug lethal injection method was unreliable, potentially causing excessive pain in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

State officials went back to the drawing board. Brown’s execution was scheduled in 2010 during a window in which California believed it had met lethal injection protocol issues, but the date was withdrawn and then stayed over additional challenges.

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Source: PE, December 28, 2013

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