Since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, it has executed 13 inmates, the last one in 2006.
Here are things to know about California’s death row.
WHAT HAPPENS TO CONDEMNED INMATES’ SENTENCES AND APPEALS?
They will remain on death row, sentenced to death and their appeals will continue. County prosecutors can still demand the death penalty, and trial court judges can still sentence convicted murderers to death after a jury recommends execution. But no executions will be scheduled while the governor’s moratorium remains in effect.
“Everything keeps going as before,” said Santa Clara University law professor Ellen Kreitzberg. “Just no executions.”
WHERE ARE CONDEMNED INMATES KEPT?
They are confined to individual cells in one of three special sections of San Quentin State Prison. There are 520 cells stacked five stories high in the prison’s east block, where the vast majority of condemned inmates live. There are three dozen cells on the sixth floor for condemned inmates deemed to cause the least trouble. The so-called “adjustment center,” the solitary confinement wing of death row for disruptive prisoners, has 81 cells.
The 22 women sentenced to death are housed in the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. No woman has been executed since California reintroduced capital punishment in 1978.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SO-CALLED DEATH CHAMBER?
Newsom ordered the dismantling of the never-used death chamber at San Quentin. Prison officials built it in 2008 in an attempt to comply with a federal court order to improve death chamber conditions and training of execution staff. The sterile chamber was built on the site of the prison’s old gas chamber. Death by gas was stopped in 1996 after a court ruling questioned its constitutionality.
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WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON EXECUTED IN CALIFORNIA?
Clarence Ray Allen, 76, was executed by lethal injection at 12:20 a.m. Jan. 17, 2006, after spending 22 years on death row. He was the oldest inmate executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment. Allen was convicted of ordering the 1980 murders of three people he believed had helped prosecutors convict him of a 1974 murder. He was serving a life term for the 1974 murder of a burglary accomplice when he ordered the three additional murders. Billie Ray Hamilton, who Allen met in prison, was convicted of the triple slaying and sentenced to death, but died at age 57 of natural causes in 2007.
WHICH INMATE WAS TO BE EXECUTED NEXT?
Authorities called off the lethal injection of Michael Morales two hours before his scheduled Feb. 21, 2006, execution for the murder and rape of a 17-year-old girl. Prison officials said they could not comply with a recent court order requiring licensed medical professionals to administer lethal injections. California then indefinitely suspended capital punishment to rework its lethal injection policies and procedures. Since then, 25 condemned inmates including Morales have exhausted all of their appeals and were considered “next in line.”
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WHO HAS LIVED ON DEATH ROW THE LONGEST?
One of the two “Tool Box Killers,” Lawrence Bittaker, 78, entered death row on March 30, 1981, after he was convicted of raping, torturing and killing five teenage girls in 1979. His accomplice, Roy Lee Norris, accepted a plea bargain of life in prison without parole in exchange for testifying against Bittaker. They were called the Tool Box Killers because of the everyday tools they used in their crimes.
WHO WAS THE NEWEST DEATH ROW INMATE?
Eric Jimenez, 34, arrived on death row on Nov. 29, 2018. A Tulare County jury found him guilty in 2018 of two gang-related murders, six years after Porterville police arrested him in California’s Central Valley. His first appeal — an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court — has not been filed.
Source: washingtonpost.com, The Associated Press, March 13, 2019
How Scott Peterson’s sister-in-law, law enforcement feel about death penalty moratorium
Janey Peterson was glad to hear that Gov. Gavin Newsom granted reprieves to all 737 condemned inmates awaiting executions in California prisons. Her brother-in-law, former Modesto resident Scott Peterson, has been on death row for nearly 14 years for murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son.
The death penalty moratorium will be in place for the duration of Newsom’s time in office. After that, a future governor could decide to resume executions. That doesn’t do much for Scott Peterson’s appeals, his sister-in-law said.
“Clearly, it’s a relief,” she told The Modesto Bee during a phone interview 17 minutes after Newsom signed an executive order halting the death penalty. “But it’s hard to understand how it’s going to impact our case, because the reality is that Scott’s execution day wouldn’t fall within Governor Newsom’s term. It wouldn’t be scheduled within those eight years.”
The written briefs in Scott Peterson’s appeals have been submitted, but the state Supreme Court has not yet scheduled oral arguments. That process could take several years.
Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, who led the prosecution against Scott Peterson, said Wednesday she was surprised by Newsom’s sudden announcement to halt executions.
“I think the family members and friends of the victims of death row inmates will be justifiably outraged by this decision,” Fladager said in an e-mail.
The state hasn’t executed anyone in more than a decade because of legal challenges. But without Newsom’s moratorium, executions could have resumed for more than 20 inmates who have exhausted their appeals if those challenges were cleared up.
Laci vanished from her Covena Avenue home on Christmas Eve 2002. Her husband said he had been fishing in San Francisco Bay and came home to an empty house, and thousands joined in unsuccessful searches.
Scott Peterson was arrested shortly after the bodies of mother and fetus washed ashore in the bay. He was later convicted of double murder, and he has been housed on death row at San Quentin State Prison since March 2005.
On Wednesday, attempts by The Bee to speak to Laci Peterson’s family were unsuccessful. Her mother, Sharon Rocha, was relieved when California voters in 2016 rejected Proposition 62, which would have eliminated the death penalty and commuted death sentences to life in prison without parole.
“I just hope people truly understand what (the death penalty) is about,” Rocha told The Bee in November 2016. “It’s not about revenge or paybacks. It’s about due justice.”
A rival initiative to speed up the process of capital punishment, Proposition 66, was approved by the voters in that same California election.
Newsom has been a longtime opponent of the death penalty, but he promised before the November 2016 election that he would not let his opinions get in the way of the public’s right to determine what to do with the death penalty.
While campaigning for Prop. 62 to repeal the death penalty in 2016, he told The Modesto Bee editorial board he would “be accountable to the will of the voters,” if he were elected governor.
Fladager, who also is president of the California District Attorneys Association, said Newsom took an oath to uphold the state’s Constitution, which includes enforcing the death penalty, “a very rare sanction reserved for the worst of the worst murderers.”
She said even Gov. Jerry Brown didn’t take action so contrary to the will of the voters as Newsom’s moratorium has.
“He is clearly letting his own personal feelings drive his official decision-making,” Fladager said about Newsom.
Modesto Police Chief Galen Carroll said he wasn’t surprised by the decision to stall executions, since Newsom is opposed to the death penalty.
“California hasn’t really been using the death penalty, and the odds of dying of old age on death row are higher than the odds of an execution being carried out,” Carroll said in an e-mail Wednesday.
But he said there certainly are criminal cases where both the voters and those with knowledge of the case believe a death sentence is the appropriate punishment.
Carroll said he is not giving Newsom “a free pass,” since he is the governor, who is tasked with fulfilling the will of the voters. Carroll also said that speaking about the death penalty in sterile or political debates is different than being the person who signs a death warrant or carries out the execution.
Oakdale Police Chief Scott Heller said the decision whether to seek the death penalty resides with prosecutors, and that decision is evaluated and ultimately decided in the court system.
“Life and death decisions are difficult and demanding,” Heller said in an e-mail Wednesday. “The governor has issued his executive order based upon his beliefs.”
Source:
modbee.com, Rosalio Hahumada, March 14, 2019
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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
