USA - California. Officials reach settlement on path to resuming executions

Officials reach settlement on path to resuming executions. Authorities in California, where the death penalty has been on hold since 2006, have reached a court settlement that would require the state to create lethal injection rules that could allow it to resume executions, officials said today. Attorneys for California, the most populous U.S. state, submitted the settlement to the Sacramento County Superior Court on Monday in a lawsuit brought by family members of murder victims who say the state's failure to provide a viable execution method denies them justice. (see November 6, 2014). California prison officials, represented by the office of Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris, pledged under their settlement to release proposed regulations for a resumption of lethal injection within 120 days of the Supreme Court decision. The state has 749 inmates on death row and has not carried out an execution since 2006 when a federal judge found problems with its three-drug cocktail for lethal injection. Officials tried to fix those deficiencies, but a state judge in 2011 deemed the process a failure. Under the latest settlement, prison officials plan to propose a single-drug protocol for executions, said Deborah Hoffman, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. On July 16, 2014 (see), another federal judge, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney in a ruling that applied to only one inmate plaintiff, Ernest D. Jones, found California's system for imposing and carrying out the death penalty was so long and drawn-out it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.