This story is taken from Sacbee / Politics.

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/875706.html


California still has legal issues on lethal injection executions
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, April 20, 2008
Every night, when Barbara Christian shuts her eyes and tries to go to sleep in her rural Sacramento County home, the same nightmare haunts her.

It's the vision of her daughter, Terri Lynn Winchell, 17, dying a brutal and grotesque death, murdered and raped by Michael Angelo Morales in a Lodi vineyard.

"I try to maintain, but as long as Morales is alive, I go to bed and wake up and I see her face, going through the crime, flailing out, and nobody's there to help her," Christian said. "I live that 24/7. Until he pays for his crime, nothing is going to stop that nightmare."

Morales, 48, who came within hours of execution on Feb. 21, 2006, is first up again on California's execution list as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Wednesday that repaved the way for capital punishment by lethal injection.

His execution had been held up as a result of a federal judge's ruling in San Jose even before the high court decided to consider the lethal injection issue on another case in Kentucky. Along with the San Jose judge's ruling, a finding by a Marin Superior Court judge that the state didn't gather public input in putting together its new lethal injection procedure also needs to be resolved before California can once again plunge the executioner's needle.

Despite those pending cases, Barbara Christian still welcomed the news from Washington, D.C., that the Supreme Court, on a 7-2 vote, green-lighted lethal injection executions.

"I'm happy they finally resolved that," she said of the court's decision that lethal injection is constitutional. "I just hope it won't take a long time with these other appeals and things they're bringing up, so we can get this under way and done. The main thing is, we've waited 27 1/2 years. I want to get some closure on this. As long as he's alive, it keeps the nightmare right before my eyes."

San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Chuck Schultz said the Kentucky decision "takes a lot of the arguments away" from the similar federal case in San Jose that focused on whether the procedure inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.

Schultz brushed aside the Marin County case as a "bump in the road" that "will be dealt with quite quickly."

"It is nothing that is really going to stop this thing," he said.

If the two cases are resolved, prosecutors will need to get a new death warrant issued by Ventura County, where Morales' trial in Winchell's Jan. 8, 1981 slaying was moved from San Joaquin County. Lined up behind Morales are four other death row inmates who have had all their state and federal habeas corpus appeals resolved, according to state Deputy Attorney General Ward Campbell.

To the same extent that death penalty supporters welcomed the Supreme Court's ruling, opponents of the ultimate sentencing enhancement found themselves disheartened.

"I was hoping if they said no, it's not legal, we'll get a moratorium and people would finally learn the truth about the death penalty and we could be a civilized country," said Aba Gayle, a former Folsom resident who now lives in Oregon.

Despite her opposition to the death penalty, Gayle shares a horror in common with Barbara Christian. She, too, had a teenage daughter murdered by a killer now on death row.

Gayle's daughter, Catherine Blount, 19, was stabbed to death on Sept. 29, 1980, in the town of Ophir, near Auburn. Her boyfriend, Eric Lee Hanson, 29, also was beaten and stabbed to death. An acquaintance named Douglas Scott Mickey, now 59, murdered them in their sleep. According to court papers, Mickey thought Hanson had stolen property from his family.

For 12 years, Gayle said, she "was just full of anger and rage," anxiously waiting for Mickey's death sentence.

"It was ghastly," Gayle said of her inner turmoil. "It was a horrible way to live. That's what the death penalty does to victims' families. You're always waiting for that magic bullet. DAs keep telling you when the execution happens, you're going to be OK again. But the idea of having closure on your own child's death is ridiculous."

Gayle said a spiritual conversion changed her outlook. She said that, coming home from church one night in 1992, "I heard a voice say, 'You must forgive him and you must let him know.' "

That night, Gayle said, she wrote to Mickey. He responded and Gayle visited him at San Quentin. Then she took up the cases of several other death row prisoners, including Manuel Babbit and Clarence Ray Allen, who have since been executed.

Gayle now considers herself a death penalty "abolitionist."

"I'm a student of miracles," Gayle said. "I just continue to be out in the world. I can't argue with people. I don't try to convince them of anything. I just tell them my story, tell them there's another way to be, feel and think."

At San Quentin, prison spokesman Sam Robinson said the Supreme Court's ruling did not come as a surprise to any of the 669 residents of the row.

"From what I've gathered so far, and I've walked through the unit, they expected the decision, so it wasn't surprising to the population," Robinson said. "It's just business as usual."

Stefanie Faucher, program director of Death Penalty Focus in San Francisco, said the anti-capital punishment group is still clinging to the protections lent from courtrooms in San Jose and Marin County to keep the death chamber inoperable.

"We don't need to panic at this time," Faucher said.

Morales' lawyer, David Senior, said opposing parties in the federal case still need to cut through a legal thicket before anybody in California gets executed.

Among the issues to be resolved: the lethal three-drug cocktail the state had been using and whether it results in unreasonable pain to the condemned, whether there needs to be medical equipment close at hand, and how the members of the execution team are selected, managed and monitored.

"It's A to Z," Senior said.

For Barbara Christian and for Terri Winchell's four brothers and father, the emotional toll of nearly three decades has extended far beyond any alphabetical boundaries.

She said the family won't be satisfied with Morales being anything short of dead.

"You want to know that this monster has been paid justice, has paid his due," she said.