As if gay marriage wasn’t a hot enough topic, the First District Court of Appeal on Friday effectively tossed the state Supreme Court a prickly death penalty case.
The appellate panel affirmed a Marin County Superior Court ruling that the state failed to follow proper public-vetting policies in establishing a new lethal injection procedure last year. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Friday that state attorneys were still reviewing the ruling and had not decided whether to appeal. But given the state’s dogged efforts not to conduct a full-scale public review of its lethal cocktail plans, you can bet the attorney general’s lawyers will be knocking on the Supreme Court’s door soon.
More on the twisty recent path of the death penalty in California after the jump.
Friday’s ruling effectively extends the moratorium on executions that’s been in place since December 2006 when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, in a separate case, held that California’s pre-2007 lethal injection procedures were unconstitutional. Fogel has said he would wait until the First District issued its opinion before considering the state’s new protocol for executing condemned inmates.
The state’s lawyers argue that because the new death penalty policy only affects San Quentin — and not every state prison — it’s not subject to laws requiring public scrutiny.
“It makes you wonder why the state doesn’t want to come up with a lethal injection protocol in a public way,” said Ty Alper, associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC-Berkeley School of Law.
Corrections department spokesman Seth Unger said he did not know how long a public review of the new procedures might take or whether that process would be faster than fighting the current legal challenge.
— Cheryl Miller
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