State attorney general seeks federal order to execute rapist-murderer

The California attorney general’s office asked a federal appeals court Wednesday morning to issue a writ that would clear the way for the state’s first execution in more than four years.

State lawyers argued in their brief that U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel should not have halted the execution of Albert Greenwood Brown Jr. in order to properly review the state’s new lethal-injection procedures.

The attorney general’s office said Brown’s attorneys failed to show any evidence that the state’s new procedures for lethal injections would cause a condemned prisoner severe pain and noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled two years ago that similar procedures used for executions in Kentucky were constitutional.

Brown, who was convicted of the 1980 rape and murder of a 15-year-old Riverside girl, was scheduled to be executed at 9 p.m. Thursday at San Quentin State Prison.

A federal judge Tuesday had ordered a halt to the execution, saying there was "no way" the court could conduct a proper review of new lethal injection procedures before the scheduled execution.

Fogel reversed a decision he handed down Friday that the execution could go forward if the state gave Brown the option of dying by a single-injection method used in other states, rather than the three-drug cocktail prescribed by California's new regulations.

A federal appeals court returned the case to Fogel late Monday, saying he had "erred" in offering Brown an execution method unauthorized in this state. 

-- Jack Leonard

Comments

[L.A. Native]

For the life of me, I cannot comprehend how our left-leaning judicial system has the temerity to postpone the execution of a convicted murderer because there may be a millisecond of pain experienced by this miscreant when they lethally inject him. I'm sure his victim endured plenty of pain, and her family has now been exposed to some three decades of pain waiting for justice to be served.

[AAA]

The judge is right. The state dropped the ball, by spending almost a million for a new death row and forgot to get enough current drugs, that it might NOT KILL him. Then what do you do, smother with him the pillow?

[Robert L. Mead]

Here we go again. Another Judge who has put himself above the law and a juries' decision. Hang the judge, dose the rapist.

[B.]

The death penalty is a broken, dysfunctional system. We should immediately switch to a policy that puts away murderers for life without the possiblity of parole.

Not one of us walks home any safer on Thursday if Brown is executed. We should be saving the enormous amount of money we spend on the death penalty and putting it towards efforts to increase public safety - community policing, cops, rehabilitation programs, homicide detectives, you name it.

We could be doing so much more to protect the public if we just abolished the death penalty and focused our attention on preventing crime.

[John Adams]

Why is it so important to Jerry Brown that he win the election? Whatever the reasons are, they must be plenty nefarious considering that he's willing to get someone executed to accomplish this.