High Court to Consider Death Row Fast Track

The U.S. Supreme Court, granting an appeal from California prosecutors, said Friday that it will consider allowing the state to put death row inmates on a new fast track toward executions.

Prosecutors have long complained about endless appeals in death penalty cases, and California is often cited as an example.

Although juries in the state have sent more than 500 inmates to death row at San Quentin, only four have been executed in the last 20 years. Most of the condemned killers are far more likely to die of natural causes than from a lethal injection, prosecutors contend.

The delays are the product of a dual system of appeals--one state, one federal. Even after a state supreme court upholds a death sentence--a process that usually takes several years--the appeals can begin again in federal court. Those too have typically gone on for years.

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In early 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress and President Clinton agreed on a law to shorten the appeal process in federal courts.

Under the law deadlines were imposed on inmates and federal judges. For example, once a state supreme court rejects a final appeal, an inmate has 180 days to file a new appeal in a federal court. The judge then has 180 days to act on it. Similar deadlines apply at the next stage in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

But lawyers representing death row inmates have challenged the law and, in California at least, stopped it from taking effect.

In May 1996, U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson in San Francisco issued a broad order forbidding its enforcement in California.

He acted on a class-action suit filed on behalf of convicted killer Troy Ashmus and 479 other death row inmates. In 1984, Ashmus lured a 7-year-old girl to a duck pond in a Sacramento park, where he raped and sodomized her and choked her to death.

His death sentence was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 1991. Since then, his appeals have been in federal court.

Henderson said California officials were not providing “competent counsel” for all death row inmates during their state appeals. Therefore, the state is not entitled to the fast-track process in federal court.

In August, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his order on a 2-1 vote.

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State Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has been much friendlier to the prosecutor’s view of the matter. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had urged Congress to limit death penalty appeals in the federal courts.

To no one’s surprise, the justices granted the appeal Friday in the case known as Calderon (the warden at San Quentin) vs. Ashmus.

The high court will hear arguments in March and issue a decision by July.

The ruling probably won’t settle the matter, however.

Lungren asked the justices to rule that the class-action lawsuit against the state was barred by the 11th Amendment, which generally protects states from being sued in federal court.

If the justice agree, that will overturn Henderson’s ruling and revive the federal law. However, individual inmates will remain free to argue on a case-by-case basis that the state failed to provide them the required legal help.