7 California death row residents have exhausted all appeals

Seven of the 713 inmates on California’s death row have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for execution once newly revised lethal-injection procedures are cleared by a federal judge:

Albert Greenwood Brown, 56, sentenced to die for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Susan Jordan of Riverside County in 1980 as she walked to Arlington High School. Before the murder, he had been out of prison only four months after serving time for the rape of another teen.

Stevie Lamar Fields, 54, sentenced to die for a three-week crime rampage in 1978 that included three rapes, a robbery, two kidnappings and the shooting and beating death of 26-year-old USC graduate student Rosemary Cobbs. He had been out on parole from a manslaughter conviction for two weeks when the crimes occurred.

Michael Angelo Morales, 51, sentenced to die for the 1981 rape and murder of 17-year-old Lodi high school student Terri Winchell. His challenge of the previous lethal-injection procedures on 8th Amendment grounds led to the moratorium on executions that has been in effect for nearly five years.

Kevin Cooper, 52, sentenced to die for the 1983 hacking deaths at a Chino Hills horse farm of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old neighbor Christopher Hughes. Cooper, a convicted robber and rape suspect, had escaped from the nearly prison at Chino two days before the slayings.

David Raley, 48, sentenced to die for the 1985 kidnapping, beating and torture of high school students Laurie McKenna and Jeanine Grinsell at Hillsborough’s vacant Chateau Carolands, where he worked as a security guard. Both girls were bound and dumped in a ravine near Raley’s house; Jeanine died of her injuries, Laurie survived.

Mitchell Carlton Sims, 50, sentenced to die for the 1985 killing of Domino’s pizza deliveryman John Harrington in Glendale. Sims, a drifter who had been fired from the pizza chain two months earlier, killed two Domino’s employees in South Carolina before fleeing to Glendale, luring Harrington to his motel room with a pizza order, stripping and drowning him in the bathtub, then donning his uniform to enter the pizzeria to rob its safe and tie up two other employees.

Fernando Belmontes, 49, bludgeoned to death 19-year-old Steacy McConnell in 1981 after breaking into her San Joaquin Valley home to steal a stereo, which he sold for $100, with which he bought beer. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the death sentence in June after vacating it three times and each time having the U.S. Supreme Court order the conviction reinstated.

carol.williams@latimes.com