California ends fight over execution access
By The Associated Press
01.14.03
SAN FRANCISCO — California has ended its six-year legal battle over allowing reporters and others to view executions from beginning to end, a Corrections Department official said yesterday.
The announcement means witnesses at San Quentin State Prison will be able to watch as executioners walk the inmate to the gurney, strap him down and insert the deadly poison.
The Corrections Department adopted restrictions to watching executions at San Quentin in 1996, shortly before the state’s first lethal injection. That year, the state switched from the gas chamber.
At William Bonin’s execution that year, a curtain was pushed back to reveal Bonin already strapped to the table with needles and tubes inserted into his body.
The procedures were challenged by the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the California First Amendment Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the prison policy last August. A Corrections Department spokesman said the state would not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We had lost appeal after appeal, ruling after ruling,” prison spokesman Russ Heimerich said.
The 9th Circuit and U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the state’s claim that executioners may be harmed if they are visible to witnesses was “exaggerated” and that the public has a right to view how the state carries out executions.
The August ruling was the third time the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled on the matter.
It sided with the state once and twice with the news media, ordering the state to allow witnesses full view of Keith Williams’ lethal injection execution three months after Bonin’s.
Witnesses also watched the entire executions of the last two California inmates killed in 2001 and 2002. Executioners did not shield their faces.
“Proceedings should be open because questions of capital punishment are important issues,” said Alan Schlosser, an ACLU attorney. “There is a real value of having an independent witness to know how it was carried out and how the inmate was treated.”
None of the California’s more than 600 death row inmates are scheduled to die this year.
The case is California First Amendment Coalition v. Woodford.