California Superior Court judge hears testimony on one-drug executions

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A California team of executioners is rehearsing how to use a new lethal injection to end the lives of death row prisoners with a single drug, an expert witness testified Friday.

John McAuliffe, a former corrections officer who has been contracted to develop the new single-drug protocol, made the disclosure before a judge who is considering the Los Angeles County district attorney's bid to immediately execute two death row inmates.

McAuliffe said the execution team would be composed of registered nurses who know how to insert IV lines.

Executions in California have been on hold for years while appellate courts consider the legality of the three-drug protocol now in place in the state.

Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler heard extensive arguments and ordered lawyers to return to court Sept. 10 for further proceedings.

"I do have concerns whether I have the authority to do what the district attorney wants me to do," Fidler said. "If I have the authority to order a one-drug execution do I also have the authority to use the gas chamber or order a firing squad?"

District Attorney Steve Cooley has suggested a virtual end-run around the current logjam in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal over the way executions are done.

Deputy District Attorney Michelle Hanisee said the three drugs used previously are no longer available and a pharmaceutical company plans to stop making one of them.

"The manufacture of the drug will expire

in 2014 and we will never be able to use that protocol again," she said. "We have a single drug method which they can use now."

Deputy Attorney General Jay Goldman said the 9th Circuit has not approved the one-drug method.

Hanisee said the firing squad was long ago ruled cruel and unusual punishment, but the court could order an execution "by any means currently authorized."

Cooley's motion involves the execution of two murderers who have been on death row for more than 25 years.

Mitchell Sims and Tiequon Cox have exhausted all of their appeals. Cox, a gang member, was convicted of shooting a grandmother, her daughter and two grandchildren in 1984. Sims was convicted of shooting a pizza deliveryman in Glendale in 1985 after killing two co-workers at a pizza restaurant in Hanahan, S.C.

He fled to California with his girlfriend, who also was convicted and is serving a life sentence. He also faces a death sentence in South Carolina.

The last execution in California was in 2006, the same year that a federal judge imposed a moratorium following complaints that the three-drug method was causing excruciating pain and was cruel and unusual punishment. A state ruling in 2011 cited the same issue in suggesting that the method did not comply with the state Administrative Procedures Act.

There have also been objections from the medical community to having medical personnel including anesthesiologists participate in executions.

The moratorium is expected to last into 2013. In the interim, voters face a ballot initiative in November that would replace the death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole.

A key premise of the initiative, Proposition 34, is that California has spent $4 billion on a dysfunctional capital punishment system that has resulted in just 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in California in 1978. For a brief period, beginning in 1972, the death penalty was held as unconstitutional in the state and death sentences were commuted to life.

There are currently 725 prisoners on death rows throughout the state. Since 1978, 57 death row inmates have died of natural causes, six from other causes and 20 committed suicide.

Source: http://www.thereporter.com/ci_21075668/california-superior-court-judge-hears-testimony-one-drug?source=rss_emailed

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