The new death row complex at San Quentin State Prison will feature 768 cells, 1,152 beds, six guard towers, a hospital and two fences, one of them electrified. That is, of course, if the complex is built at all.

The state this week began soliciting bids from contractors to build the $356 million expansion to California’s only holding facility for prisoners condemned to death. Story from the Mercury News.

In announcing his call for bidders Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the first year of work on the project would be paid for through a loan from the state’s general fund – a loan that would be paid for next spring, should state Treasurer Bill Lockyer agree to issue bonds to cover the overall cost of the project.

Lockyer has been unwilling to issue those bonds so far because of a lawsuit filed against Schwarzenegger by members of the state Legislature. Those legislators, including San Rafael Assemblyman Jared Huffman, say the governor acted outside the law when he vetoed a bill that would have required the state to answer several questions about the new death row complex before approving the funds to build it.

“What the governor is really trying to do is get the state a little bit pregnant with this terrible project, so the next governor has no choice but to finish it,” Huffman said. “The fact that the governor is thumbing his nose at pending litigation over the legality of his ability to pursue this project is something to be considered. We hope the governor will come to his senses.”

Spokesmen for the governor have argued that Schwarzenegger was well within his rights both to veto the Huffman bill and to launch the death row construction project Thursday, lawsuit or no lawsuit.

“We believe it’s a clear-cut issue,” spokesman H.D. Palmer said Wednesday. “The California Supreme Court has affirmed that the executive branch has the authority to reduce items of appropriation in the manner that the governor did last year.”

The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is seeking bids on two phases of the project. The first, due at 2 p.m. Oct. 5, would include demolishing existing buildings and installing utilities.

The second, due Aug. 30, 2011, would include installation of an emergency generator, improvements to the Interstate 580 off-ramp, and construction of three stacked housing units and six guard towers. Each housing unit would include 180 cells, showers, counseling rooms and a kitchen.

Work on the first phase of the project would begin Nov. 5. The entire project is scheduled for completion on June 25, 2013. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections said she had no estimate as to the number of bids the department expects to receive.

“We’ve never built a condemned inmate complex before,” spokeswoman Terry Thornton said.

The Department of Corrections estimates construction of the new complex would employ about 6,000 workers, while the complex itself would employ 570 to 648 people upon completion.

jchev California, Death Penalty, Jail and Prison Construction

When Caryl Chessman died in California’s gas chamber 50 years ago — probably the state’s most notorious execution — 18 inmates were left on death row. Today, there are 702. The last execution at San Quentin State Prison was that of Clarence Ray Allen on Jan. 17, 2006, the 13th in California since 1978. News in the Sacramento Bee.

Since that day, at least 205 convicts have been executed in other states, 24 death row inmates at San Quentin have died from natural causes or suicide, and 83 people have been sentenced to death in California courts.

But no one has been executed in California since Allen. That’s largely because of two court challenges over the state’s lethal injection methods and its attempt to short-circuit the procedure for revising those methods.

Now corrections officials hope they are on the verge of winning approval of their rewritten lethal injection rules, which will give the rules the force of law.

That approval will reignite a pending legal battle over whether California can rejoin 34 other states that have the death penalty, and whether it should.

Supporters and opponents say the likelihood of executions resuming anytime soon in California is slight.

“I’ve just kind of lost faith in the system, that it’s ever going to work,” said Barbara Christian, whose daughter, Terri Lynn Winchell, was savagely raped and murdered 29 years ago when she was 17. “I’d like to see justice for my daughter.”

Winchell’s murder is at the heart of the moratorium on the death penalty in California.

Michael Morales, who hit Winchell in the head at least 23 times with a hammer, dragged her into a field and raped her while she was unconscious and then plunged a knife into her chest four times, was scheduled to die Feb. 21, 2006, for the crimes.

But the two anesthesiologists who were to monitor the lethal injection under rules set down by a federal judge backed out at the last minute, and the Morales execution was stayed.

Subsequently, legal challenges played out in two courts. Corrections officials rewrote the lethal injection procedures in a bid to satisfy U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who earlier had ruled that they posed a risk of cruel and unusual punishment and needed to be altered.

In November 2007, a Marin Superior Court judge barred the changes, saying they needed public review and approval by an obscure state agency. A hearing in Sacramento drew death penalty opponents from around the state and 102 speakers. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was bombarded with 20,000 written comments.

The 42-page final rewrite of the procedures includes an elaborate process for selecting and training an execution team as well as tight controls and record-keeping on the storage and use of the three drugs meant to knock out inmates, then paralyze them and, finally, stop their hearts.

The duties of each team and sub-unit are spelled out in minute detail, starting well before the day of execution. Meanwhile, the department constructed a new death chamber at San Quentin in an attempt to satisfy other concerns Fogel had.

The revised procedures were submitted for review April 29 to the state Office of Administrative Law. But the constitutional challenge before Fogel is a much higher hurdle.

He concluded in December 2006 that the state’s capital punishment methods were unconstitutional. He said the records of previous executions exposed “actions and failures to act” that created a risk of cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.

“This is intolerable,” he declared.

During the next legal round, Morales’ lawyers are expected to argue the new rules still offer no guarantee that the three-drug protocol will not subject the inmate to excruciating pain.

Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, is derisive of the proposed procedures.

“The governor and the Department of Corrections are simply tinkering with the machinery of death, and have not dealt with any fundamental problems,” she said in a telephone interview.

But Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which favors the death penalty, said he believes the state will be in a much stronger position when it gets back before Fogel because of an intervening decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court upheld Kentucky’s lethal injection method in a 2008 opinion that “is right on point,” Scheidegger said in a telephone interview. “The argument there — that the three-drug cocktail poses a risk of unacceptable pain — was the same as the one in the Morales case, and the court has spoken on the issue. I don’t know what more his lawyers can say.”

No matter how Fogel rules, the Morales case will move on to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, perhaps before an expanded panel. And some observers say the U.S. Supreme Court may decide to accept it for review because of the massive amount of evidence accumulated in California.

jchev California, Death Penalty

They wait alone, in cells of just a few square meters, often for 15 or 20 years, sometimes more. For US inmates on death row, the sentence is just the beginning of a long countdown to execution. News from the AFP American Edition.

The lengthy wait and harsh conditions that US death row prisoners face has sparked debate over whether they are being punished twice, with long-term imprisonment and execution — and even US Supreme Court justices have weighed in.

On average, 13 years elapses between the time a death sentence is handed down and carried out.

During that time, inmates are kept under close guard, confined to their cells alone for 23 hours a day with limited visitation opportunities. Their activities are often reduced to nothing more than filing new appeals against their death sentence.

In 2005, a record 137 of the 3,263 prisoners on US death row were over 60 years old, almost four times more than a decade earlier.

In Kentucky, more people on death row have died of natural causes than have been executed in the last 30 years.

Pennsylvania has executed just three people since 1976, but it continues to send an average of just over four people a year to death row, and currently has 225 people awaiting execution.

In California, there are 694 prisoners on death row, a US record, but all executions in the state have been suspended since January 2006 because of a court battle over the legality of the lethal injection method used in the state.

Anti-death penalty activists describe the long and isolated wait faced by prisoners on death row as a second punishment, and some even believe it amounts to a form of torture.

“People on death row live under the threat of death, which is of course an extraordinary psychological trauma, and they are denied most of the ways that people make life in prison more tolerable: meaningful social activity, programming of any kind, activities,” said Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Haney, an expert on prisoners held in isolation, said death row inmates held for years are prone to depression and mental illness and can became extremely distrustful and completely apathetic.

Some “become so dismayed and despondent that they actually give up,” he told AFP.

“I’ve seen some clients who’ve been on death row for over 20 years. They simply become wound down by the deprivation, wound down by the degradation and wound down by the isolation.

“As a result, in some instances they simply give up the way they live and decide that they can’t endure this any longer, even if there is a possibility that enduring it a little longer would result in their sentence being overturned.”

Some, like Lawrence Reynolds, have taken extreme measures. Reynolds, who was sentenced to death in Ohio in 1994, attempted suicide in March while still on death row.

He managed to stockpile medication that he had been prescribed and overdosed. He was found unconscious in his cell and taken to hospital, where he recovered, and was executed a week later.

The US Supreme Court has declined on several occasions to formally consider whether long waits on death row constitute a violation of the US Constitution.

But two of the highest court’s justices have raised questions about the practice in rulings on other death penalty issues.

In March 2009, ruling on a case involving an execution in Florida, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned “whether the Constitution permits… execution after a delay of 32 years — a delay for which the state was in significant part responsible.

In December 2009, Justice John-Paul Stevens made an even clearer statement about his view of lengthy pre-execution waits.

“The delay itself subjects death row inmates to decades of especially severe dehumanizing conditions of confinement,” he wrote in a case involving a prisoner who had spent 29 years on death row.

But others say the wait is simply a function of a lengthy appeals process that protects the right of death row inmates to seek a reversal of their sentence.

And conservative judges note that death row inmates always have the right to waive their appeals, and move more swiftly towards execution.

jchev Death Penalty, United States

Harris County, Texas, used to be known as the death penalty capital of the United States, the focus of national and global outrage over an outdated, costly and immoral form of criminal justice. But things have changed: Harris County now has a sentencing record that looks like Denmark’s, and the hanging judges (or rather, prosecutors) seem to have relocated to liberal Los Angeles. Editorial in the LA Times. Report available from the ACLUNC.

A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that Los Angeles County sent more people to death row last year than any other county in the U.S. — and more than the entire state of Texas. The trend is particularly odd given that most of the rest of the country is headed in the opposite direction. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the number of death sentences nationwide last year was the lowest since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

A spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office says that 2009, when 13 felons were sentenced to death, was an anomaly because some capital cases took years to get to trial. Indeed, although the number of inmates sentenced to death annually was often in the double digits in the 1990s, there were only six in L.A. County in both 2008 and 2007. But that still doesn’t fully explain why the office isn’t following the lead of prosecutors in the rest of the U.S., who are pursuing fewer capital cases because in recent years some condemned inmates have been shown to be innocent and the economic costs of capital punishment are becoming harder to bear.

Los Angeles isn’t the only killer county in California; death sentences were also up sharply in Orange and Riverside counties last year. The rest of the state, though, seems to be more in line with the national trend, according to the ACLU.

California hasn’t killed an inmate in four years because of a legal battle over execution procedures, and its condemned population has soared above 700. That exceeds the capacity of San Quentin State Prison’s death row, which is in need of a $395.5-million upgrade. Expenses related to the death penalty cost the state $137 million per year, according to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, at a time when Sacramento is trying to cope with a $20-billion budget deficit.

The cost, of course, isn’t the best reason to end the death penalty — it’s that an imperfect justice system cannot provide 100% certainty of guilt, making us all guilty of state-sanctioned murder when the courts get it wrong. That’s why most developed nations have done away with capital punishment. In that context, L.A. prosecutors aren’t just being overzealous, they’re being inhumane.

jchev Death Penalty

More death row convicts were executed in the United States this year than last, but juries continue to grow more wary of capital punishment, according to a new report. News from The New York Times.

Death sentences handed down by judges and juries in 2009 continued a trend of decline for seven years in a row, with 106 projected for the year. That level is down two-thirds from a peak of 328 in 1994, according to the report being released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organization that opposes capital punishment.

“This entire decade has been marked by a declining use of the death penalty,” said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the group.

The sentencing drop was most striking in Texas, which averaged 34 death sentences a year in the 1990s and had 9 this year. Vic Wisner, a former assistant district attorney in Houston, said a “constant media drumbeat” about suspect convictions and exonerations “has really changed the attitude of jurors.”

Mr. Wisner said that while polls showed continued general support for capital punishment, “there is a real worry by jurors of, ‘I believe in it, but what if we later find out it was someone else and it’s too late to do anything about it?’ ”

In 2005, Texas juries were given the option of sentencing defendants to life without parole.

While death sentences are in decline, executions rose in the past year, according to the new report. Fifty-two prisoners have been put to death in 2009, compared with 42 in 2007 and 37 in 2008.

The report also noted that in 2009 New Mexico became the 15th state to repeal the death penalty, in part because of budget considerations and the high cost of death penalty appeals, which Gov. Bill Richardson called “a valid reason” for eliminating the ultimate sanction “in this era of austerity and tight budgets.”

But Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment, argued that the decline in death sentences also corresponded to a decline in the murder rate, and criticized efforts to use cost arguments against the death penalty. The government could “knock a large chunk off of the cost” of execution by streamlining the review process, he said.

Douglas A. Berman, an expert on sentencing law at Ohio State University, suggested that the rise in executions was due to last year’s relatively low number, as states grappled with the implications of a major 2008 Supreme Court decision on lethal injection.

In that case, Baze v. Rees, the court ended what amounted to a moratorium of several months, beginning in 2007, on lethal injection executions by proclaiming that the procedure used in Kentucky and other states with similar methods did not violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

This “post-Baze echo” in the figures, Mr. Berman said, can be seen in the execution in Ohio this month of Kenneth Biros. It came after a legal challenge to Ohio’s protocol, a botched execution under the state’s three-drug method for another prisoner, and a shift to a one-drug execution method. While other court challenges to lethal injection are proceeding around the country, he said, Ohio’s action suggests that “states are moving forward.”

jchev Death Penalty, Sentencing, United States

Small Box, a new opera set in a death row visiting room, will have its world premiere in Bloomington next month.  Reported by Linda Greene, in the Bloomington Alternative.

With music by Herman Whitfield III and a libretto by Bruce L. Pearson, the one-act, hour-long opera takes a serious look at the death penalty without arguing either for or against.

“The opera,” Pearson said in a phone interview, “offers a fairly typical cross-section of those who find their way to death row.” With Small Box he hopes to “make people think by presenting a realistic view of prison life.” The raw material, Pearson said, “is from getting to know the guys on the row.”

Pearson is an Indianapolis native who lives in Bloomington and holds degrees from Earlham College, Indiana University and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught anthropology and linguistics at the University of South Carolina for 31 years before retiring to Bloomington.

During his years in South Carolina, Pearson taught college classes in the state prison and later worked as a volunteer teacher and counselor in the prison’s death row unit. Every incident in the opera has actually taken place, some on death rows in places other than South Carolina.

The opera has a cast of eight — six men and two women. Two of the men are prison officers assigned to the death row visiting room. The officer in charge is an older man, whose assistant is a new officer, still learning the ropes after two weeks on the job.

One inmate is a multiple murderer who, because of a judge’s error, had his death sentence reduced to life in prison. He works as the unit’s janitor. Among the other inmates is a mentally retarded man who is visited by his attorney, a young woman. Another is a mentally deranged youth who heard voices telling him to go to a schoolyard and shoot the children there. Finally, there is a young man who was involved in a murder for which his partner has already been executed. He has now received an execution date and receives a visit from his wife and infant son.

Whitifield, the composer, is a two-time winner of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Emerging African-American Composers competition. His works have been performed by the Detroit Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony and other orchestras. He is an adjunct professor of music at Martin University in Indianapolis.

Whitfield studied at IU, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. He has composed music for films and was selected as a participant in the 2007 Aspen Music Festival and the School’s Film Scoring Institute. At Indiana, he studied piano performance and political science. At the Cleveland Institute he studied orchestral conducting. Small Box is his first opera, and he will conduct the premiere performance.

The stage director is Lesley Delk, a Bloomington-based soprano enrolled in the doctoral program in operatic stage direction at the IU Jacobs School of Music.

Small Box is the product of a “happy collaboration” by the librettist and composer. After he finished the libretto, Pearson joined the Composers’ Forum and placed a notice in its newsletter indicating that he was looking for someone to write the music for the libretto. One of the respondents was Whitfield, and after extensive conversations, the two recognized that they were “on the same wavelength.” Pearson and Whitfield plan to work together on the rest of a trilogy of operas, the remaining two not yet set to music.

The performance is sponsored by the Bloomington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the statewide Indiana Information Center to Abolish Capital Punishment.

jchev Death Penalty

In this time of economic turmoil some legislators in Kansas and elsewhere say the price of justice is too high. They have introduced legislation to take the death penalty off the books over financial concerns. CNN reports.

“Because of the downturn in the national economy, we are facing one of the largest budget deficits in our history,” state Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Republican, said in an opinion piece posted on TheKansan.com Friday. “What is certain is we are all going to have to look at new and creative ways to fund state and community programs and services.”   The state would save more than $500,000 per case by not seeking the death penalty, McGinn wrote, money that could be used for “prevention programs, community corrections and other programs to decrease future crimes against society” …

A 2008 study by the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy research group based in Maryland, found that an average capital murder trial in the state resulting in a death sentence costs about $3 million, or $1.9 million more than a case where the death penalty is not sought.  A similar 2008 study by the ACLU in Northern California found that a death- penalty trial costs about $1.1 million more than a non-death-penalty trial in California …

New Mexico, which also has a bill before the Legislature to abolish the death penalty, has already seen a case where costs dictated the outcome. Last year, the New Mexico attorney general’s office agreed to drop the death penalty for two inmates involved in the stabbing death of a guard, Ralph Garcia, during a 1999 riot at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility.   The change came after the state Legislature failed to provide additional funding for defense attorneys contracted to handle the case by the public defender’s office.  In court documents filed at the time, Attorney General Gary King said his office could not “in good faith under these circumstances” pursue the death penalty against Robert Young and Reis Lopez …

In Colorado, House Bill 1274 proposes to put the anticipated savings from abolishing the death penalty toward the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s cold case homicide team.

Other States with bills for an economic end to the death penalty include Washington, Montana, Nebraska, Texas and New Hampshire.

jakking California, Colorado, Death Penalty, Economic Issues, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, Washington

The following opinion piece was written for the LA Times by Jeanne Woodford, former director of the California Department of Corrections, and former Warden of San Quentin State prison.

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, “Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?”  We knew the answer: No.

I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state — director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.I didn’t reach that conclusion because I’m soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever — people such as Robert Lee Massie.

I presided over Massie’s execution in 2001. He was first sentenced to death for the 1965 murder of a mother of two. But when executions were temporarily banned in 1972, his sentence was changed to one that would allow parole, and he was released in 1978. Months later, he killed a 61-year-old liquor store owner and was returned to death row. For supporters of the death penalty, Massie is a poster child. Yet for me, he stands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.

I remember I did my job, but I don’t believe it was the right thing to have done. We should have condemned Massie to permanent imprisonment — that would have made the world safer. But on the night we executed him, when the question was asked, “Did this make the world safer?” the answer remained no. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him. that night clearly. It was March 27, 2001. I was the last person to talk to Massie before he died. After that, I brought in the witnesses. I looked at the clock to make sure it was after midnight. I got a signal from two members of my staff who were on the phone with the state Supreme Court and the U.S. attorney general’s office to make sure there were no last-minute legal impediments to the execution. There was none, so I gave the order to proceed. It took several minutes for the lethal injections to take effect.Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It’s cheaper — much, much cheaper than execution.  I wish the public knew how much the death penalty affects their wallets. California spends an additional $117 million each year pursuing the execution of those on death row. Just housing inmates on death row costs an additional $90,000 per prisoner per year above what it would cost to house them with the general prison population. A statewide, bipartisan commission recently concluded that we must spend $100 million more each year to fix the many problems with capital punishment in California. Total price tag: in excess of $200 million a year more than simply condemning people to life without the possibility of parole.

If we condemn the worst offenders, like Massie, to permanent imprisonment, resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities. The money also could be used to intervene in the lives of children at risk and to invest in their education — to stop future victimization.  As I presided over Massie’s execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men such as Massie in the first place?

As director of corrections, I visited the Watts district in Los Angeles and met with some ex-offenders. I learned that the prison system is paroling 300 people every week into the neighborhood without a plan or resources for success. How can we continue to spend more than $100 million a year seeking the execution of a handful of offenders while we fail to meet the basic safety needs of communities such as Watts?  It is not realistic to think that Watts and neighborhoods like it will ever get well if we can’t — or won’t — support them in addressing the problems they face.

To say that I have regrets about my involvement in the death penalty is to let myself off the hook too easily. To take a life in order to prove how much we value another life does not strengthen our society. It is a public policy that devalues our very being and detracts crucial resources from programs that could truly make our communities safe.

jakking California, Death Penalty

• San Luis Obispo CA needs to solve overcrowding for women
• Florida reports that death row inmates cost about 50% than general population.
• Grayson County TX needs a new jail — but not near me!
• Canyon County ID balances budget by delaying jail building

jakking CA San Luis Obispo County, Death Penalty, Female Inmates, Florida, Overcrowding, TX Grayson County, Texas

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has a lot of work to do. The federal government is requiring New Hampshire to execute convicted murder Gary Sampson. And Attorney General Kelly Ayotte is seeking the death penalty in the murder cases against Michael Addison and John Brooks. But right now the state doesn’t have a place to put people to death- it doesn’t even have a death row. New Hampshire Public Radio’s Dan Gorenstein looked into just what New Hampshire must do to prepare. Select here for the audio broadcast. And here is the written transcript.

jakking Death Penalty, New Hampshire