Cocktails and killings

On January 17, 2006, Clarence Ray Allen was put to death in San Quentin State Prison’s death chamber, making him the last person executed in California.

The “cocktail” administered to Allen was similar to the one used in the April 29 execution (gone awry) of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma—a combination of a sedative, a paralytic and a heart-stopping dose of potassium chloride.

The Oklahoma debacle—where Lockett took 43 minutes to die after he emerged from an unconscious state when a vein exploded, according to witnesses—highlighted problems with lethal injection as California struggles to put its own death house in order.

“This ought to be a warning to California as it contemplates its next protocol,” says Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law.

The Golden State, meanwhile, will vote this November on whether to bring back the death penalty by speeding up the executions process.

When a federal judge halted executions in California in 2006, Semel notes, he did so in part because of evidence that six of 11 executions had gone bad. She says the state’s history of inadequate training and monitoring of prison officials charged with administering lethal dosages begs “real questions about whether people have suffered” as a result.

Allen was sentenced to death in 1980 for orchestrating two murders while serving a life sentence for the killing of Mary Sue Kitts in 1974. His attorney, Michael Satris, recalls that his elderly client was in such poor health that he “couldn’t even make it under his own strength to the chamber—they had to lift and carry him.”

Allen was administered a second dose of potassium in order to complete the execution, since his heart would not stop beating.

After the execution, the state couldn’t find a medical technician willing to administer the drugs to the next person up for the ultimate penalty.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ended the practice and directed the state to come up with new protocols. Seven years later, it hasn’t done so. Allen was executed in the former San Quentin gas chamber, and the state built a lethal-injection chamber in 2008 that remains unused.

Gov. Jerry Brown has pushed for the adoption of a single-drug protocol, but pharmaceutical companies have stopped selling the drug, sodium thiopental.

Meanwhile, former Govs. Gray Davis, Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian have thrown their support behind a proposed November measure that would sharply limit capital-case appeals and leave it to local drug companies to provide the drugs to San Quentin, outside of public scrutiny.

The ballot measure follows a national trend whereby officials have refused to reveal the source of the execution drugs.

Oklahoma had experimentally administered the short-acting sedative midazolam to Lockett. He regained consciousness in the middle of the procedure. Lockett eventually died of a heart attack.

Under the California ballot initiative underway, there would be no public review of the drugs’ origins.

“The more we know about the drugs being used, the greater we guard against the chance of this happening again,” says Semel.

Proposition 34, a 2012 ballot measure, would have ended executions in California and commuted the sentences to life without parole. It failed, with 48 percent voting in favor.

The close vote revealed that attitudes about capital punishment had tightened in a state where the practice has long been the costliest ($4 billion spent for 13 executions since its reinstatement in 1978, according to a 2011 study) and most inefficient in the country, owing to lengthy appeals and judicial review.

A few states have suspended capital punishment after death-row inmates were exonerated. A just-released study by the National Academy of Sciences found that “if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated.”

In California, there were 741 people on death row as of late 2013.

Despite its de facto moratorium, California led the nation in capital-crime convictions in 2013, as reported by the national Death Penalty Information Center. That year, 24 individuals were added to the ranks of the condemned.