Jaturun Siripongs, a 43-year-old Thai national, practicing...

Jaturun Siripongs, a 43-year-old Thai national, practicing Buddhist, jailhouse artist and model prisoner, was executed at San Quentin on January 9 for a double murder at an Orange County grocery store in 1981. The Thai Foreign Minister, Surin Pitsuwan, requested Gov. Gray Davis, just three weeks in office, to grant clemency. Mr Surin's request cited Jaturun's good conduct during his 15 years on the death row. "Model behavior cannot bring back the lives of the two innocent murder victims," Davis wrote in a 10-page decision rejecting clemency. During the execution, which prison officials said began at 12:04 a.m. and ended with pronouncement of his death at 12:19 a.m., Jaturun Siripongs' eyes never opened, no sound passed from his lips. There was never a sign that he was conscious, just the slight breathing under the tightly cinched straps and one apparently involuntary movement midway through the procedure that was a cross between a yawn and a gasp. Capital punishment in California is a process so rigidly controlled that often the only way to tell when the execution is over is when a guard reads a prepared statement at the end. "Prison officials want to relate to the public that lethal injection is a humane and safe method of execution, and it might well be better than others," said San Francisco lawyer David Fried, the lead attorney in a lawsuit over how executions are conducted. "But it seems to me only the public can make that decision.""What's happened across the country is that clemency has fallen into disuse," said Santa Clara University law Professor Gerald Uelmen, a death penalty expert. "Every politician is scared that an exercise of political clemency will come back to haunt them in the next election."Taking at least as tough a stand on criminal sentencing as his Republican predecessor, Gov. Gray Davis has rejected parole requests made unanimously by the Board of Prison Terms in all five of the murder cases the panel has sent him. Former Gov. Pete Wilson rejected only 20 parole recommendations during his 8-year tenure, said Denise Schmidt, spokeswoman for the prison board.