State Poised to Step Up the Pace of Executions

For the first time since the death penalty was reinstated in California, the state is poised to execute more men in short order than it has since the 1960s.

Thomas Martin Thompson, 43, died by lethal injection Tuesday morning, still declaring his innocence at the end of his appeals process. Bill Bradford, 52, has volunteered to die for the strangulation murders of two aspiring young models; his execution is set for Aug. 18.

Condemned triple murderer Horace Kelly, 38, was scheduled to die a week ago, but a federal appeals court ordered a July 23 hearing into legal challenges to his conviction. Depending on the court’s decision, prosecutors say, he could receive another execution date later this year.

And at least a dozen men on death row have exhausted all legal remedies, are awaiting decisions on their fates by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and could receive execution dates within the next year, court sources say.

Until Thompson’s death at 12:06 a.m. Tuesday, the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison had not been used for two years. Only five men, including Thompson, have been executed in California since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

To be sure, California’s current step-up in activity--credited in part to more conservative high courts at the state and federal levels--is minor compared with the 37 condemned inmates executed in Texas last year. And there are considerable roadblocks to any real flood of executions in this state, including a dearth of defense lawyers willing to represent condemned inmates during the appeals process.

But the scheduling of three executions within six weeks of each other is believed by both death penalty proponents and opponents to be a shift for a state that is viewed by many as so slow to kill that it effectively has no death penalty at all.

“It’s certainly premature to think that floodgates will burst open and we’ll look like Texas in a matter of months,” said David Fermino, Kelly’s federal public defender. But a speedup in executions “is inevitable where you have in excess of 500 people on death row.”

Indeed, one reason for the speedup is simple size: California has 508 men and women on death row, and on average, some 30 to 40 more are condemned each year. All appeals are eventually exhausted.

In addition, the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 has undergone its first rounds of court challenges and is beginning to hasten the pace of executions, some legal experts say.

The effective death penalty act--so-called habeas corpus reform--gives condemned prisoners only one year under most circumstances to file an appeal with a federal district judge to challenge the constitutionality of their sentences. In the past, there was no time limit.

“California will eventually get to the point where they’ll have two, three, four executions a year, maybe more,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. “It can’t be stopped. They used to have four to five executions a year in California. The numbers are there for even more.”

Texas executes far more people than any other state, with 11 dying there so far this year, compared with just Thompson here. But its death row is No. 2 in size in the country, after California’s.

The last time this state executed inmates in the double digits was in 1962, when 11 of the condemned died at San Quentin. Before that, there were 11 executions in 1938, 1948 and 1949, 13 in 1945 and an all-time high of 17 in 1935 and 1936.

Death Row Backlog

Lawrence Brown, executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn., calls the state’s current backlog of condemned inmates a “national embarrassment.”

Although at least a dozen inmates on death row are likely to get execution dates within the next year, “it remains to be seen whether those executions will be carried out any time soon,” Brown said. “We’ve all seen dates being set and then postponed. . . . It remains to be seen whether we are on the verge of a new dynamic in death penalty executions in California.”

If there is a shift, Brown points to a variety of reasons: the “tremendous backlog” of men and women waiting to die, a state Supreme Court “that no longer is serving as a barrier to implementing the death penalty” and a U.S. Supreme Court that has shown little patience with delays.

Thompson’s execution is a case in point. Thompson was condemned to death for the 1981 rape and murder of an Orange County woman. He insisted to the end that he and Ginger Fleischli had had consensual sex, that he later fell asleep and he never saw her again.

After nearly two decades of legal twists and turns, Thompson was scheduled to die last August. But 32 hours before the execution, a special 11-judge federal panel blocked his death, saying that it had grave doubts about his guilt.

But earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that panel of the 9th Circuit in a tart rebuke, stating that the evidence against Thompson was too overwhelming and allowing the execution process to go forward.

Michael Rushford, president of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argues that the Thompson, Bradford and Kelly cases “are an indication of what’s to come” in California.

Since so-called habeas corpus reform was passed in 1996, “there’s only a finite number of issues that can be argued [on appeal] and federal reform has limited the ability of defendants to raise additional issues,” said Rushford.

Just how much the execution process would have to speed up to make a dent in California’s crowded death row is a sore point on both sides of the death penalty debate.

If the state executed one person a week, it would take nearly 10 years to kill every condemned man and woman on the existing death row. But because about 30 to 40 more are sentenced to death each year, by the end of that decade, there would still be a death row of around 400 inmates.

“Ever since the AEDPA got passed, there’s been an incentive on the part of states to create their own little death mills,” said Lance Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus. Lindsey sees a speedup of executions as inevitable and argues that “the state is putting down an infrastructure to implement this whole business of fast-tracking executions.”

California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren was not available for comment, but in written statements released before and after the Thompson execution, he decried the 17 years spent in legal wrangling leading up to Thompson’s execution. And he credited recent changes in the law and the makeup of the California Supreme Court with speeding up the execution process.

“Since Thompson committed his heinous act, we have seen a change in California’s Supreme Court, ridding the state of Justice Rose Bird, who probably set California’s capital punishment process back 10 years,” Lungren said.

“Hopefully, the changes we have helped implement will make the process more considerate of the victims’ families so that death penalty cases will not drag on for years,” he said.

In an effort to speed up a process that can take six to 15 years, the state Legislature recently created and funded the California Habeas Resource Center to cut out one chunk of the considerable delay: the huge number of condemned inmates without attorneys to shepherd their appeals.

As of December, 150 of the affected inmates had representation; 165 did not, up from only 27 in 1989, according to the legislative analyst’s office. In fact, each month an average of three new death penalty judgments are issued, while defense counsel has only been appointed in two cases each month.

This lack of attorneys is one significant roadblock to a serious speedup of the execution process, legal experts say. The resource center is still being put together and will not have an impact any time soon.

Once the center is up and running, however, “we could truly have a death penalty law in California,” said Brown.

INMATE SAID GOODBYES: Thomas Thompson mouthed farewells to friends after receiving lethal injection. A3

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(Southland Edition, A14) Next to Die

In addition to Bill Bradford and Horace Kelly, the following men could receive an execution date within the next year, according to court sources.

* Fernando Caro, 48, convicted of fatally shooting two teenage cousins in 1980.

* Douglas Daniel Clark, 50, convicted of murdering six women and attempting to murder a seventh in 1980.

* Russell Coleman, 46, convicted in a 1979 rape and murder in San Francisco.

* Alfred Dyer, 45, convicted in 1983 of killing two people.

* Bernard Hamilton, 47, convicted in 1981 of kidnapping, robbery, burglary and first-degree murder.

* Michael Anthony Jackson, 44, convicted of killing a West Covina policeman with the officer’s own shotgun.

* Robert Cruz McLain, 58, convicted in the 1979 rape and murder of a Ventura woman.

* Darrell Rich, 43, convicted of a 1978 rape and murder rampage that resulted in the deaths of three women and a girl.

* Jaturun Siripongs, 46, convicted in the 1981 robbery-murder of a Garden Grove market manager and her clerk.

* Robert Edward Stansbury, 55, convicted in the 1982 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old Baldwin Park girl.

* Freddie Lee Taylor, 38, convicted of beating to death an elderly woman in 1985.

* Ralph Thomas, 44, convicted of killing two Grateful Dead fans in 1995.