2 condemned multiple murderers, including a serial killer, apparently committed suicide within hours of each other on the nation’s largest death row, California officials said Monday.
Corrections officials said they found Andrew Urdiales, 54, unresponsive during a security check at San Quentin State Prison late Friday.
He was sentenced to death on Oct. 5 by an Orange County judge for killing 5 women in California, and previously faced the death penalty for 3 murders in Illinois.
Urdiales had been on California’s death row since Oct. 12.
Separately, authorities say they found Virendra Govin, 51, unresponsive alone in his cell in a different death row housing unit late Sunday.
Govin was sentenced in December 2004 for committing four Los Angeles County murders.
Officials said that while both men’s deaths are being investigated as suicides, there is no indication that their deaths are related.
California has not executed anyone since 2006 and inmates are far more likely to die from suicide or old age.
Since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978, 79 condemned inmates have died from natural causes, 25 have committed suicide, 13 have been executed in California, 1 was executed in Missouri, and 1 was executed in Virginia.
There currently are 740 offenders on California’s death row.
The suspected suicides were announced the same day that a federal court-appointed special master who oversees prison mental health care criticized California corrections officials for proposing that they be allowed to start negotiating an end to federal oversight of suicide prevention efforts.
Special master Matty Lopes called the state’s proposal “incredibly premature” given the continued problems outlined in an expert’s report also released Monday.
Attorneys representing inmates said the state’s suicide rate is, for the second year in a row, on track to exceed 24 suicides per 100,000 inmates. That was before 6 suicides since Sept. 1, including the 2 on death row.
That far exceeds the national state prison rate of 16 suicides per 100,000 inmates.
The exchange came as a federal judge considers appointing an outside investigator to weigh a whistleblower’s allegations that top California corrections officials are misleading federal officials about improvements in the treatment of mentally ill inmates.
State officials again denied that there was any fraudulent activity but said some mistakes have since been corrected.
Source: The Associated Press, November 6, 2018
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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
