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SAN FRANCISCO—The insanity of the
death penalty was exposed in September when the state of California
maneuvered to lift a nearly five-year ban on executions and delivered a
death warrant to inmate Albert Greenwood Brown. The legal
wrangling led death-house officials at San Quentin State Prison, which
holds California’s only execution chamber, to jump into action with a
flurry of media interviews and a PR campaign seeking to promote their
newly updated death chamber, which they hope will meet new state
regulations.
Prison reps pointed out during a
media open house that the new death chamber is roomier and brighter
than the old chamber, which had been used for two executions by lethal
gas and 11 by lethal injection since capital punishment was restored in
1977. Prison officials showed off the modernized witness section and
explained that it now allows for segregated seating between the
victim’s families and the loved ones of the condemned. The new execution
chamber cost the state over $800,000 and was built by inmate labor.
The temporary ban on California
executions, which are carried out by a three-drug lethal injection, was
the result of the botched execution of Stanley Tookie Williams in
December of 2005. Williams, a co-founder of the Crips street gang,
became the subject of a worldwide campaign to stop executions after his
personal redemption inspired countless articles, as well as a Hollywood
movie.
“Big Tookie” authored a series of
powerful children’s books that empowered young people to struggle
against the violence of poverty and embrace a movement towards peace on
the streets. Williams penned the Protocol for Peace, which was used in
the early 1990s by Los Angeles gang members to negotiate a peace
treaty, and he was a Nobel Prize nominee for peace and literature nine
times over.
Supporters of Williams filled the
streets around the world to protest the 2005 execution and gasped in
horror upon learning that executioners fumbled over a fully conscious
Williams for nearly 15 minutes to find a vein to inject the lethal
cocktail. Death came for Williams approximately 35 excruciating minutes
after he was strapped to the gurney.
One month after the execution of
Stanley Tookie Williams, California botched another execution. On
Jan. 16, 2006, the state executed Clarence Ray Allen, an elderly deaf
and blind Native American who was crippled from diabetes and had
recently suffered a heart attack. Executioners failed to inject a
sufficient amount of the lethal cocktail into Allen’s veins and
struggled with a second injection, which eventually stopped his heart.
Allen’s execution fell on his 77th birthday and the national
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
In February 2006, a federal judge
ordered a halt on executions after defense attorneys for death-row
inmate Michael Morales, pointing to the Williams and Allen executions,
argued that the current lethal injection protocol is cruel and
inhumane.
Since the 2006 ban was ordered, a
state-appointed task force has been busy rewriting the lethal injection
protocol, responding to legal arguments that the three-drug sequence
used in executions may have exposed inmates to unconstitutional cruel
and unusual punishment while masking the pain by paralyzing the inmate.
The three drugs used in lethal injection executions in California are
sodium thiopental, which is intended to make the inmate unconscious;
pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent; and potassium chloride, which
stops the heart.
A Superior Court judge blocked the
state’s first attempt at restarting the death penalty on the grounds
that the new protocol was written without public participation. After
that ruling, the California Department of Rehabilitation and
Corrections redrafted the protocol and submitted it for public
examination. A state office approved the new protocol in July of this
year.
With that obstacle out of the way,
California attempted to move forward with its first execution by
petitioning the state Supreme Court to accelerate an appeal deadline in
a state lawsuit filed by Michael Morales and one other inmate.
However, the court’s seven justices unanimously agreed, “No compelling
reason appears why this court should, by extraordinary means, remove an
obstacle to Brown’s execution by denying” the normal appeal time in a
case filed by two other inmates.
While the state was attempting to
overcome the final obstacles to restart executions, it faced another
major issue. San Quentin’s only supply of one of the drugs used in
executions, the sedative sodium thiopental, had expired. Because of a
national shortage, executioners do not expect to obtain more until
early 2011.
Soon after the ruling, state
lawyers officially dropped their appeal and cancelled the execution.
The cancellation, however, should not give anti-death-penalty activists
a reason to breathe easy. Since executions have been on hold, the
population of California’s death row has swelled to over 700. As a sign
that the state intends to increase the use of capital punishment,
Governor Schwarzenegger has approved $356 million to build a new
death-row facility at San Quentin.
If the state is not challenged, at
least five men, including innocent death-row inmate and anti-death
penalty activist Kevin Cooper, could face the execution chamber as soon
as the state’s legal obstacles are removed.
The time to organize against the
death penalty is now! Contact rebecca_doran@yahoo.com for information
on how to get involved.
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