If executions resume in California, at least three San Diego defendants could be next in line

It has been 11 years since the state has executed an inmate in California.

That’s a good sign for those who hope to see the death penalty abolished some day.

To those who support capital punishment, some of them prosecutors or crime victims, it’s a sign of what’s broken in California’s particular brand of criminal justice, and that long delay is likely what prompted 51 percent of voters to pass Proposition 66 in November.

The ballot measure, dubbed The Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016, promised to shrink the amount of time from when a defendant is sentenced to death and when he or she is executed, which now takes at least a couple of decades. In part, it required death penalty appeals be decided within five years.

And that’s a key provision that was challenged on constitutional grounds in the state Supreme Court. Opponents of Proposition 66 argued that the five-year time limit imposes a “mandatory” deadline by which all post-trial matters must be resolved, and encroaches upon the court’s authority to “balance the matters before them in a way that is fair to all litigants.”

In short, the California Supreme Court would have to devote 90 percent of its time to death penalty cases over the next several years to get through a massive backlog.

On Aug. 24, the state’s highest court upheld the new law and ruled that the five-year requirement for resolution of post-trial appeals was a “directive” and therefore not mandatory.

That led some supporters of the measure to suggest that executions could resume in California with a matter of months. (Regulators still have to approve a new drug protocol that would be used to execute condemned inmates.)

Currently, the state has are more than 740 death row inmates, more than 15 of whom have exhausted their appeals, putting them next in line for execution.

Among them are Hector Ayala, 66, a San Diego man convicted in the execution-style murders of three men during an auto shop robbery in 1985; Richard Samayoa, 64, convicted in 1988 of fatally bludgeoning a south San Diego neighbor and her daughter in December 1985; and Kevin Cooper, 59, who was convicted of murdering four people in Chino Hills in 1983 after escaping from the California Institute for Men, where he was serving time for burglary.

Cooper’s trial was moved to San Diego County because of extensive publicity about the case in San Bernardino County. He came within hours of dying by lethal injection in 2004, until an appeals court ordered DNA testing of evidence from the crime scene.

In all, 38 inmates are committed to death row from San Diego County, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who stepped down July 7 after leading the office for 14 years, asked for the death penalty 34 times during her tenure, but many of those cases never made it to trial.

Of those that did, juries recommended death eight times. Those defendants are:

• George Williams, 61, an Indiana man sentenced to death for the 1986 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 14-year-old Chula Vista girl.
• Manuel Bracamontes, 54, a former Chula Vista bus driver sentenced to death for the 1991 kidnapping, molestation and murder of his 9-year-old former San Ysidro neighbor.
• Jeffrey Young, 43, an Orange County man sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of two South Bay people gunned down during a botched robbery at a Lindbergh Field-area parking lot.
• Eric Anderson, 43, a Poway tattoo artist sentenced to death for the April 2003 murder of the owner of the Cajon Speedway.
• Adrian Camacho, 42, a gang member and small-time drug dealer sentenced to death for killing a rookie Oceanside police officer during a traffic stop in 2003.
• Tecumseh Colbert, 33, was sentenced to die for fatally shooting two men in separate incidents in San Diego during a 22-day crime spree in 2004.
• Derlyn Threats, 36, sentenced to death for the torture killing of a young mother during a burglary in her Vista home in 2005.
• Jean Rices, 36, sentenced for the execution-style slayings of two people during a 2006 liquor store robbery in El Cajon.

Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dana Littlefield, September 2, 2017

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde