Executioners questioned about lethal injection

SAN FRANCISCO - A US judge made an unusual visit to the death chamber at California's San Quentin prison on Thursday to ask questions about lethal injection, which is under challenge by an inmate condemned to die by the procedure.

Jeremy Fogel, a judge on the US District Court for Northern California, is considering a motion from convicted killer Michael Morales that maintains lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Morales, who raped and bludgeoned a 17-year-old girl to death in 1981, was slated to die in February. The prison called off the lethal injection at the last minute because it could not comply with Fogel's order that two anesthesiologists be present to assure the prisoner did not suffer undue pain.

In what prison officials said was the first hearing of its kind after more than a century of executions at San Quentin, Fogel asked prison guards on Thursday about the process in which an inmate is strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal chemicals. The procedure is used for executions in 37 states.

San Quentin initially hanged condemned prisoners starting in 1893, and 215 inmates later the state turned to lethal gas.

Fogel visited the airproof, aquamarine metal chamber first used in 1938. The chamber is used today by guards who attach intravenous lines for lethal injections.

California executed 194 people by gas through 1967, when the chamber went unused for a quarter century amid court fights over the death penalty. California executions resumed in 1993, but a federal judge ruled the next year that gassing inmates to death constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred by the US Constitution.

To date, no US court has found execution by lethal injection to be cruel and unusual.

Prison officials at San Quentin have offered to increase the dose of anesthetic before two lethal chemicals start flowing. Fogel is due to hold a full court hearing on the lethal injection procedure in his San Jose courtroom in May.

California, the most populous US state, has 648 inmates who have been sentenced to death but it rarely carries out society's harshest penalty. Of the 64 condemned prisoners who have died on death row since 1980, 13 were executed at San Quentin, and 50 died of natural causes, suicide and other reasons. One was executed in Missouri.

- REUTERS