The Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has urged Governor Schwarzenegger and the Secretary of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to resume executions under authority provided by state law.
“The California Penal Code allows the CDCR to adopt regulations immediately to meet the operational needs of the department,” said the Foundation’s Legal Director Kent Scheidegger. “Carrying out executions after the case has been fully reviewed is an operational need. California has over 700 convicted murderers on death row. The state Constitution requires a prompt and final conclusion of post conviction proceedings. The Supreme Court approved a similar execution protocol two years ago. Yet the state’s ability to resume executions remains bogged down in the administrative process.”
The Foundation notes that the Supreme Court’s April 2008 decision in Baze v. Rees, which upheld Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol, ended a one year moratorium on executions in other death penalty states. Yet California has been unable to enforce its death penalty law, even though its protocol was cited by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent as being better than the Kentucky procedure upheld by the high court majority.
Most of the delay is the result of a court ruling which held that the CDCR execution protocol was subject to the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. The Schwarzenegger Administration chose not to challenge that ruling, although no prior execution process had been subject to the Act’s requirements. After over a year of required comment and review, last week the state Office of Administrative Law has added further delay by its cramped review of the regulation. For example the OAL claims that the regulation does not comply because it permits the warden to invite members of the news media to witness executions when state law permits the warden to invite “reputable citizens.” “This amounts to an abuse of the process to delay enforcement of the death penalty,” said Scheidegger.
The Foundation cites the case of Michael Morales, who strangled, beat, raped, and stabbed 17-year-old Terri Winchell in 1981. “There is no question regarding the guilt of this murderer. The judgment has been reviewed and affirmed by several courts, yet the victim’s family continues to wait for justice because the process is stalled in bureaucracy,” said Scheidegger.
