The secrecy-shrouded, botched execution in Oklahoma on Tuesday couldn't happen the same way in California, where state laws and regulations require public disclosure of the drugs used in lethal injections, where they come from and how they are administered.
But the agony of a dying murderer and other death penalty developments underscore the multiple problems besetting capital punishment in California, where executions have been put on hold until courts find no significant prospect of a nightmare like the one that unfolded Tuesday night.
The state, whose Death Row is the nation's largest, has not executed anyone since 2006 because of federal court rulings arising from executions in which the prisoner appeared to remain conscious longer than expected, and from ill-defined procedures and inadequate staff training. State officials are making their third attempt to rewrite the rules for lethal injections to include safeguards that would satisfy the courts.
California has also encountered the nationwide shortage of lethal drugs that led to the debacle in Oklahoma, where a prisoner writhed in pain on the execution table, and died 40 minutes later of heart failure. He had been injected with an untested combination of chemicals whose source was concealed by prison officials.
Supplies dwindling
The two states have used different combinations of three drugs, all approved for executions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. All California has left is the first of the three drugs, the sedative sodium thiopental, and its supply expires this month.
State officials have proposed switching to one-drug executions, using a single large dose of sodium thiopental. But U.S. manufacturers of the sedative have ceased production, and many European countries are refusing to ship drugs to the United States for executions.
As in the past, any new execution drugs California officials obtain will be disclosed so that prisoners and the public are fully informed, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
"We've always been transparent," she said. "The three drugs (used in previous executions) and how they're administered is all laid out on our website."
Elizabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor who directs the school's Death Penalty Clinic, agreed that California is less secretive than Oklahoma. But with a dwindling supply of execution drugs, she said, prison officials in other states have resorted to non-FDA chemicals or compound drugs whose manufacturers are reluctant to be identified.
"The less reliable the source of chemicals, the greater the need to know who is manufacturing them and what their composition is," as the Oklahoma execution illustrates, she said.
There were also implications for California in a death penalty study published this week by the National Academy of Sciences. Based on a statistical analysis of U.S. capital cases, it concluded that at least 4.1 percent of the prisoners sentenced to death in the United States were innocent of capital crimes, and that most of those wrongly convicted will probably die in prison.
Wrongful convictions
That rate, if applied to California, would mean at least 30 of the 745 inmates on Death Row were wrongly convicted.
The study said the rate of publicly declared exonerations - 1.6 percent, or 138 of the 8,500 defendants sentenced to death since 1973 - misses many inmates who are unable to clear their names because of a lack of resources, or flaws in the legal process.
Most of them, the study said, have won rulings that have reduced their sentences to life in prison. At that point, their ability to claim and prove their innocence plummets: They have less access to lawyers and the courts, which restrict new appeals by inmates, and the legal system treats their claims with far less urgency than those of inmates facing execution.
The study also said the error rates make it all but inevitable that a small fraction of the 1,320 prisoners executed since 1977, and of those still facing execution, were innocent of capital murder.
Those who were wrongly executed "might have been exonerated if they had remained alive and on Death Row," the study said.
5 exonerated in state
Since California legislators passed a death penalty law in 1977, five inmates who had been sentenced to death have been freed from prison after being cleared of murder charges. Thirteen inmates have been executed.
Death Row exonerations in California have been less frequent than in most other states, although California provides more funding for defense lawyers than most states, and takes much longer to decide death penalty appeals. The long appeals process has been a source of complaints from prosecutors, who are backing an initiative being circulated for the November ballot that seeks to speed up the process and limit the right to appeal.
The initiative, endorsed by former Govs. George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis, would also eliminate public hearings on new lethal injection procedures and shift death penalty appeals from the state Supreme Court to the lower appellate courts. It would set a five-year limit on state court review of death sentences, which now takes a decade or longer.
"It certainly is possible to get this done (faster) if courts put a priority on it," said the initiative's author, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
Matt Cherry, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco organization that opposes capital punishment, said California has prudently put executions on hold while trying to address problems that have arisen in other states. The proposed initiative, he said, "would put us in the same situation as Oklahoma."
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1i16VyB
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