Lawyer questions CA execution set before election

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San Quentin Prison‘s warden walked to the death row cell of Albert Greenwood Brown on Aug. 31 and read a warrant informing him of his scheduled execution this week.

Prison staff then examined the convicted rapist and murderer to ensure his veins were healthy enough to handle a lethal injection scheduled for Wednesday. And, then, just as quickly, a federal judge on Friday refused to block the execution, or reconsider the decision on Saturday.

With that, Brown made a surprising leap to the top of the long list of California death row inmates facing execution. Certainly, it was unforeseen by legal experts, by the federal judge who halted executions in 2006 and by Brown’s own lawyers.

Late Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel extended a deadline until noon Sunday that allows Brown to choose his execution method. He can decide between a lethal injection of one drug or the three-drug cocktail California has used in its last 12 executions.

Fogel said he would cancel the execution if prison officials refused a request for a one-drug execution. But in court filings Friday and Saturday, the state said it was prepared to carry out such an execution.

Brown’s lawyers have wasted no time in blaming the possible execution on election-year politics, saying that Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office initiated it because the state’s top lawyer is locked in a tight campaign battle with Republican Meg Whitman.

Brown’s campaign called the charge “patently false.”

For the past five years, defense lawyers have assumed that no executions would be scheduled until another death row inmate’s challenge to the state lethal injection process was decided. Michael Morales came within two hours of being executed in 2006. He was thought to be at the top of the list, and his lawsuit was viewed as a test case.

But the attorney general’s office and county prosecutors are also pursuing execution dates for several other death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals, which Albert Brown’s lawyers said violates an informal agreement to wait on the outcome of Morales’ challenge.

“I had personal assurances from the state to that effect,” Brown’s co-counsel, John Grele, told a federal judge on Tuesday in a bid to delay his client’s execution. “It’s an orchestrated effort to move things forward.”

Attorney General spokeswoman Christine Gasparac said “there was never such an agreement.”

Attorney General Brown has always had a fractious relationship with the death penalty, dating to his time as governor in the 1970s and 1980s when he openly opposed capital punishment. In 1977, he vetoed death penalty legislation that the Legislature quickly overrode.

During his campaign for attorney general – and now for governor – Jerry Brown promised to “enforce the laws” of California, including defending the death penalty. Defense lawyers and others see the newly scheduled execution as a way for Brown to woo fence-sitting voters who favor the death penalty.

“The position from the attorney general previously was that they would not pursue any executions until the Morales lethal injection lawsuit was resolved,” said David Senior, who also represents the inmate Brown. “It appears that Jerry Brown is flipping on his office’s position. It seems that it is an apropos time for him to do so while he is in the heat of battle in a political campaign.”

Not true, said spokeswoman Gasparac.

“Attorney General Brown played no role whatsoever in the scheduling of the execution date,” she said.

But his office does play a role. Gasparac said the attorney general’s office notifies district attorneys when inmates from their counties have exhausted all their appeals. The office also informs the county prosecutors of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation‘s schedule. From there, the district attorneys obtain an execution date from their local court, which is what happened in Albert Brown’s case.

“There’s a lot of different entities that are involved in the execution of a condemned inmate,” Riverside County Chief Assistant District Attorney Bill Mitchell told a judge during an Aug. 30 hearing held to schedule Albert Brown’s execution. Mitchell said he also consulted with the governor’s office and the state Supreme Court in picking Sept. 29 as Albert Brown’s execution date.

Deputy Attorney General Annie Featherman Fraser was also present at Riverside County hearing.

“It was picked because of a lot of various factors and after careful consideration,” Fraser told the judge.

In an interview Thursday, Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco said he has never discussed the case with Jerry Brown, nor has the attorney general “encouraged us to move forward.”

Pacheco, who supports Whitman for governor, said it’s unfair to accuse Jerry Brown of using the case for political gain. Pacheco said his office has been seeking to execute Albert Brown for 28 years.

On Sept. 14, Pacheco wrote Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to deny Albert Greenwood Brown’s plea for clemency.

“This man showed no clemency to the young girl that he tormented before strangling her to death and dumping her body in an orange grove,” Pacheco said of the 1980 rape and murder of 15-year-old Susan Jordan. “He is least among us who deserves clemency.”

The prosecutors told Schwarzenegger that Albert Brown has never expressed remorse for abducting Jordan on her way home from school and raping and killer her. Investigators said he called Jordan’s mother several times on the day of her disappearance, taunting her with messages that she would never see her daughter alive again.

He has been on death row since his 1982 conviction.

“I have not forgotten that cruel, chilling phone call in which you so proudly made the statement, ‘You will never see your daughter alive again,’” Jordan’s mother wrote in a letter attached to the prosecutors’ packet sent to the governor. “It was then that God revealed to me that I would indeed see my daughter again, and I eagerly await that day.”

Source: Washington Post

California’s San Quentin prison gets upgraded execution facility

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Execution is going to be a much more visible and sterile experience at California‘s San Quentin State Prison from now on.

The spacious, new $853,000 lethal-injection center has three brightly lit witness viewing rooms, and each gives a considerably better view than the old, cramped gas chamber‘s lone, poorly illuminated viewing room.

On Wednesday, rapist-murderer Albert Greenwood Brown, 56, is scheduled to be executed, but whether or not he is put to death is unclear because there remain several avenues for appeal.

When California halted all executions in February 2006, a judge ruled that the state’s procedures were so badly flawed they posed a risk of leaving the dying inmate conscious and in pain at levels that violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In response, state officials revised the procedures and built the new death chamber.

It replaces the 1937-vintage gas chamber that was tucked behind a ominous-looking iron door.

The new facility has been wired with speakers so that the condemned prisoner will be able to broadcast his last words by a wireless microphone held to his lips by one of the executioners.

Scripps Howard News Service

Prison Reform Movement on Blog Talk Radio 9/24

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Jazzy Ahmed & Karen McDaniel will be my guests. Topics include an initiative for restoring California Family Visits and Highlighting services The Place 4 Grace provides to children of the incarcerated.

Show: 9/24/2010 11:00 PM   est, 10PM cst, 8PM pst

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prison-reform-movement/2010/09/25/restore-california-family-visits-the-place-4-grace

From Solitary Watch: A Chance at Freedom for the Scott Sisters?

James Ridgeway

Flyer created by supporters of Jamie and Gladys Scott

The case of sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott, two African American women serving life sentences for an $11 robbery that took place in rural Mississippi in 1993, has gained prominence in recent weeks. The case has a growing urgency, not only because of the unjust length of the sentence and issues with the fairness of the trial, but also because Jamie Scott is suffering from end-stage renal disease, and is receiving questionable care in prison.

Last Tuesday the head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, urged Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to pardon the Scotts, saying “We’re looking for the governor to be a humane person in the situation. It is a hideous event in the history of Mississippi.” According to the Jackson Advocate, Jealous joined the Scotts’ attorney, Chokwe Lumumba, in presenting a petition to Barbour requesting a pardon, clemency, or compassionate release.

In Jackson the following day, several hundred people marched past the Governors Mansion and rallied at the Mississippi State Capitol in support of the Scotts. According to Lumumba, thousands of letters have been sent asking Barbour to free the sisters.

Haley Barbour is widely thought to be in the running for the presidency on the Republican ticket, a fact that could cut two ways in the case of the Scotts. On the one hand, he might want to maintain his law and order stance at the expense of the two women. On the other hand, the Scotts’ sentence is so absurd that even the DA who convicted them says it should be reduced, and Barbour might be thinking of letting them go as a small step towards wooing the black vote. In any event, the Scott sisters’ supporters have made their case a difficult one for the governor to simply ignore, which is how he deals with most clemency requests.

Solitary Watch was among the first news sources to publish a comprehensive story about the Scott sisters’ case. You can read the original story here, and a follow-up story here.

Via @ Solitary Watch

US Supreme Court to hear California cases

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| Kitty Felde | KPCC

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The U.S. Supreme Court gets back to work in two weeks. Two cases on the court’s docket are of particular interest to California.

The case California officials will watch closely involves prison overcrowding. Last year, a panel of federal judges ordered California to reduce its inmate population by more than 40,000, saying crowded conditions led to inadequate medical care for prisoners. They ordered the prisons down to 137 percent of their actual capacity.

Pamela Harris heads the Georgetown Law Supreme Court Institute. She says California sued, arguing the federal court had exceeded its authority, using very strong language. She says the state considered the order “as a sort of massive and unprecedented interference by a federal court with state management of its own prison system.”

Federal involvement in state and local business is nothing new to California. The L.A. Police Department operated under a federal consent decree for eight years. But Harris says there’s something different about a federal court ordering the state to release thousands of inmates from prison. “It at least suggests,” he says, “a level of intrusion in a very core state operation that is or ought to be – if not unacceptable, then absolutely only used as a last resort.”

Harris says the justice to watch is Anthony Kennedy, the only Californian on the bench. She says he’s concerned that states are locking up too many people in prison for too long. But Georgetown’s Pamela Harris says Justice Kennedy also doesn’t like federal courts butting into state business. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the California prison population case at the end of November.

Another California case involves two state laws that passed five years ago – but never went into effect. They restricted the sale of violent video games to minors.

Professor Peter Edelman says the underlying thinking is that selling violence to minors is as bad as selling them pornography. Edelman, who teaches First Amendment law at Georgetown, says the Ninth Circuit didn’t buy the argument.

Edelman says the court of appeals was unimpressed by psychological research presented by the state of California that claimed violent videos damage children. He says he doubts that research will sway the Supreme Court, either. “It comes down to a societal decision about morality that takes selling pornography to children much more seriously – perhaps properly so in terms of taking it seriously – but much more seriously than selling video violence to children.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court threw out a ban on so-called “crush” videos that depict animal cruelty; the justices said the ban was too broad. Professor Edelman says he’d be surprised if the Supreme Court upholds California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors.

The court hears arguments in that case on November 2.

Related Stories

• US Supreme Court to hear California prison cap appeal (6/14/2010)
• Supreme Court Justice Breyer speaks in Los Angeles (9/16/2010)
• Prison Affliction – Medical care inside California’s state prisons

Appeals court overturns injunction against executions in California

September 20, 2010 |  6:10 pm

A state appeals court Monday removed one of the few remaining impediments to the resumption of executions in California, helping clear the way for the lethal injection of an inmate later this month.

“We are acting with the assumption that without any stay in place … that the execution will go forward,” said Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Dane Gillette.

The state is scheduled to execute Albert Greenwood Brown, convicted of raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl in 1980, on Sept. 29. But a federal judge could still delay executions, and another inmate has challenged a new lethal injection protocol.

The state has not executed anyone in nearly five years.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose halted the execution of Michael Morales in 2006 after his lawyers argued that the lethal injection procedures could expose the condemned to excruciating pain before death. Fogel has scheduled a conference on the case for Tuesday.

In 2007, a task force appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger revised the execution procedures. A Marin County judge then blocked them on the grounds they were written without public participation.

After that ruling, the California Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections redrafted the protocols and submitted them for public examination. A state office approved them in July.

Monday’s decision by a court of appeal in San Francisco overturned the Marin County judge’s injunction.

Source: LA Times

High court won’t block execution of woman in Va.

Please make just one call on behalf of Teresa Lewis- Call Governor McDonell @ 804-786-2211, press 0 and leave a message asking him to spare her life!! Execution is set for Thursday…..

The Associated Press
Tuesday, September 21, 2010; 6:02 PM

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has refused to block Virginia’s plan to execute a woman convicted in two killings, setting the stage for the state’s first execution of a woman in nearly a century.

The woman, Teresa Lewis, is scheduled to die by injection Thursday for trading sex and money in the hired killings of her husband and stepson in October 2002 for a quarter-million dollar insurance payout.

Two of the three women on the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, voted to stop the execution. The court did not otherwise comment on its order Tuesday.

Prison guards’ union endorses Jerry Brown

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The union representing the state’s prison guards rolled out today its endorsement of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown.

California Correctional Peace Officers Association President Mike Jimenez said in a news release that the union’s decision was guided by a “tremendous need for reform and a pragmatic approach and understanding of the crisis that we see within the correctional system.”

He said Brown, the state attorney general and former governor, has demonstrated the leadership and experience needed to address those challenges.

“Simply building more prisons is not the solution,” he said in a statement. “We need a governor that understands the nuances and is willing to bring all of the stakeholders to the table in a concerted effort to collectively resolve this ongoing problem.”

Brown’s rival, Republican Meg Whitman, has called for building more prisons to house the state’s inmate population.

The release, which you can read here, also states the group was looking to support a candidate who “appreciates and respects” the state workforce.

“State employees are essential to the success of California and should not be used as pawns in the political give-and-take in Sacramento,” Jimenez said in the statement.

CCPOA represents more than 30,000 correctional peace officers and parole officers working in the state correctional system.

Source: SacBee

Thousands of state inmates shut out of the classroom

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September 20, 2010 | Michael Montgomery

Tim Pearce/Flickr

Fewer than one in every ten California inmates are enrolled in an educational program, despite a pledge by state officials to enhance rehabilitation efforts in order to cut recidivism and relieve prison overcrowding.

An estimated 14,360 inmates were taking part in a variety of academic classes out of a total adult inmate population of 162,608, according to a report [PDF] released last week by the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board.

As part of its biannual report on the prison system, the board calculated enrollment in academic classes at 35.9 percent of existing capacity. That means that two-thirds of the classroom slots available for adult inmates in California were empty as of last June, when the data was compiled.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has placed a premium on educational, vocational and drug rehab programs to help satisfy a judge’s order to drastically reduce the inmate population. At the same time, the department has had to slash $250 million from adult inmate programming as part of wider cuts to the state budget.

Earlier this year officials said they were “streamlining” programs that were “proven to reduce recidivism,” in part by giving priority placement to inmates close to release. Special classes help inmates develop basic literacy skills and obtain high school diplomas.

But it appears that effort may be flagging, leaving thousands of inmates shut out of the classroom.

The oversight board said it was trying to determine if the low enrollment was “simply a result of programming startup as the department asserts, a broader systemic concern, or is concentrated in select institutions.”

Last March the board questioned [PDF] whether the department could “realistically provide rehabilitative programming resulting in reduced recidivism” after “laying off approximately 800 teachers, severely restricting the time spent in class, eliminating many vocational programs and cutting in-prison substance abuse programming to 90 days.”

Here’s a breakdown of five California prisons with the lowest enrollment figures for academic programs (measured as a percentage of available slots):

• North Kern State Prison: 7.2 percent
• R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility: 17.5 percent
• California State Prison, Sacramento: 17.7 percent
• California State Prison, Corcoran: 17.8 percent
• California Correctional Institution: 18.5 percent

The Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown ranked highest at 70.1 percent.

Source: California Watch

Jerry Brown’s office accused of playing politics over freed inmate

An attorney for Bruce Lisker, who was released after a judge found he was convicted of murder on ‘false evidence,’ questions the timing of state attorney general‘s bid to reinstate the conviction.

Bruce Lisker waves after his release from prison last year. The state plans to postpone a bid to reinstate his murder conviction on a technicality. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

By Scott Glover and Matt Lait, Los Angeles Times

September 17, 2010

An attorney for a man wrongly convicted of murder accused California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown‘s office Thursday of waiting until after the November election to seek to return the man to prison on a technicality.

But Jim Humes, Brown’s chief deputy, said politics played no role in the proposed delay, saying the attorney general needed extra time to examine the case.

“We would like some more time to think about this,” Humes said in a telephone interview Thursday. “I know [the attorney general] cares about this case and wants to consider it fully” before making a decision about whether to proceed with the motion.

But attorney William Genego, who represents freed inmate Bruce Lisker, said he believes the request is designed to push the controversial matter until after the election.

“They are playing politics with an innocent man’s freedom,” Genego said.

Lisker, 45, was convicted of killing his mother in 1985. He was released from prison last year after a judge found that he was convicted on “false evidence” and had been inadequately represented by his trial attorney. The judge’s findings mirrored those of a 2005 Times investigation that raised questions about key elements of the prosecution’s case against Lisker and exposed the Los Angeles Police Department‘s murder investigation as sloppy and incomplete.

Earlier this month, the attorney general filed a motion asking a judge to reverse her decision to overturn Lisker’s conviction because he had missed a deadline years ago by which to file his appeal.

The attorney general’s motion hinges on a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a different case decided in July. In that case, a man’s conviction for child sex abuse and sodomy had been overturned by a district court judge even though he had missed a federal deadline in which to file his habeas corpus petition. As in the Lisker case, the district court judge determined after evidentiary hearings that the man, Richard Lee, had met an “actual innocence” exception to the deadline.

The 9th Circuit reversed that ruling. The judges noted the overturning of Lisker’s conviction and said there was a “widening split among the district courts of our circuit on whether there is an actual innocence exception.” They concluded that no such exception exists and reinstated Lee’s conviction.

Because of the Lee decision, the attorney general contends in the motion that U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips should vacate her ruling in Lisker’s case. The attorney general’s motion was criticized by some legal experts as inappropriate after The Times reported on the legal maneuver.

Hours after The Times posted an article about the motion on its website, a spokesman for the attorney general said the office was reviewing the matter and was considering withdrawing it.

On Wednesday, Deputy Atty. Gen. Robert D. Breton called one of Lisker’s attorneys, seeking to continue the matter until mid-November, Genego said. He said Breton refused to say why he wanted to continue the matter, which is scheduled to be litigated Oct. 4. Genego said he would agree to continue the matter until the end of October.

Humes said neither he nor Brown were informed of Breton’s plan to file the motion. He said someone called it to his attention afterward, and he thought the move should be reconsidered. He said he sought the extension with the hope of providing Brown with a complete assessment of the case that would enable him to personally decide whether to proceed with the motion.

“To me, a continuation of the hearing is in everyone’s best interests, including — and maybe especially — Mr. Lisker’s,” Humes said.

Lisker’s legal saga began March 10, 1983, when he said he found his mother badly beaten and stabbed in the family’s home in Sherman Oaks and called paramedics for help.

Detectives were immediately suspicious of Lisker, a frizzy-haired 17-year-old with a history of drug abuse and fighting with his mother. His relationship with his parents had deteriorated to the point that they were paying for him to live in a nearby studio apartment.

Lisker’s conviction was overturned when Phillips concluded that most of the evidence used to implicate him in the crime had been seriously undermined or proved false. For example, a bloody shoe print that prosecutors used to link Lisker to the killing has since been determined by the LAPD not to have been made by his shoes. Additionally, an LAPD crime analyst now says a bruise on the victim’s head was an apparent shoe impression that did not match the treads of Lisker’s shoes but was “similar in size and dimension” to the mysterious bloody shoe print found in the house.

Source: LA Times