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By Miriam Raftery
May 4, 2013 (Sacramento) – The State Senate Public Safety on Thursday voted 5-2 to defeat SB 779, a measure authored by Senator Joel Anderson (R-Alpine) and sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association. The bill sought to speed up executions in California through several means, including bringing back the gas chamber. The bill sparked strong outcry from human rights activists who denounced the method as inhumane.
California voters narrowly defeated a bill in November that would have outlawed the death penalty. The punishment remains on the books, but due to two judicial rulings finding prior methods inhumane, the state has been left unable to carry out executions since 2006, despite death penalty verdicts.
California’s last execution using the gas chamber was in 1993. In 1994, a federal judge ruled that the gas chamber at San Quentin caused excruciating pain and violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Since then, California has executed only a handful of prisoners, using lethal injection.
But in 2006, a judge ruled that lethal injections at San Quentin, carried out by poorly trained staff, posed undue risk of an agonizing death. Doctors are prohibited by the American Medical Association from performing executions since it violates the standard to “do no harm.” Left with no alternatives, California has carried out no death penalties since the 2006 ruling.
SB 779 proposed to reinstate the gas chamber but using a “nontoxic gas administered in a lethal manner, such as by displacing oxygen” to suffocate a person to death. Kent Scheidegger, legal director at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, claimed the new method would be a “painless and more diginified alternative.”
Opponents say there is no evidence that the method would not be tortuous.
San Diego Associate director Norma Chavez-Peterson called the bill “a dangerous and extreme proposal that is out of touch with the values of the people of California,” U-T San Diego reported.
“This is a wild attempt to take California, and the rest of the United States, back to an even darker age,” CREDO stated in an email rallying opposition to the measure.
CREDO observed that the method has never been used by any other jurisdiction and that no nation in the world currently carries out executions by gas in any form. The only documented use of execution by any gas other than hydrogen cyanide is from Nazi Germany, where 12 million innocent people were killed, 1 million of them gassed using carbon monoxide.
California has previously outlawed euthanasia via gas for dogs and cats because veterinarians deemed the process inhumane.
In addition to reinstating the gas chamber, Anderson’s measure also sought to limit appeals by most condemned prisoners to one round in state court and another in federal court. It would have barred disclosure of execution drug suppliers. The bill also sought to shroud the process in secrecy by eliminating public review of execution procedures.
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