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| California brand new execution chamber |
The Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation announced Wednesday it plans to petition the 3rd District Court of Appeal today for an order telling the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to resume executions with a lethal injection of a single drug instead of the three-drug cocktail that was in use before a federal judge in San Jose imposed a moratorium on the state's death penalty.
Terri Winchell was 17 in 1981 when she was strangled, beaten, raped and stabbed to death in San Joaquin County. Michael Morales was convicted of the crime in 1983 and is the next in line to die, and the first in the new death house at San Quentin Prison.
His execution, scheduled for February 2006, was derailed by U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Fogel in response to a challenge by Morales' lawyers to the three-drug process. The moratorium has yet to be lifted, despite the department's overhaul of its process, personnel training and facility.
The foundation claims that throughout the six years since Fogel's ruling the prison system has had the authority to implement a one-drug protocol that has the approval of federal courts and is in use in Ohio, the state of Washington and Arizona.
Source: The Sacramento Bee, April 19, 2012
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