A federal judge has ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional. But the ruling will have little immediate impact on the 41 inmates housed in San Quentin and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla from San Bernardino County. (California Department of Corrections)
By G. T. Houts
San Francisco, CA – “The dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system has resulted, and will continue to result, in an inordinate and unpredictable period of delay,” Judge Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central California stated after ruling California’s death penalty was unconstitutional.
California’s 230-square-foot lethal injection room at San Quentin hasn’t been utilized since 2006. (Photo by Department of Corrections)
Ruling in the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to death in 1995 and has yet to be executed, Judge Carney strongly indicated that to take “nearly a generation” to decide on Jones’ appeals was unconstitutional. He was convicted of raping and killing a 50-year-old Southern California accountant in 1992.
The decision is expected to be appealed by the State of California to the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY INMATES
There are currently 41 San Bernardino County inmates on death row — 748 total statewide — and for them the ruling will not have much immediate impact because in 2006 the state placed executions on hold due to legal challenges to California’s lethal injection method.
Of the county’s death row inmates, Phillip Louis Lucero, now 67, has been on death row the longest. He was received at San Quentin on February 4, 1982. That’s 13 years longer than the man whose death sentence set aside by the judge’s ruling.
Lucero, a former Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was found guilty of murdering seven-year-old Chris Hubbard and 10-year-old Teddy Engliman in 1980. The remains of the two girls were found in a trash dumpster in the Yucaipa/Calimesa area after they disappeared on their way to a park near their homes on April 12, 1980.
Cynthia Lynn Coffman, now 51, is San Bernardino County’s longest death row female prisoner having been received at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla on October 5, 1992. Coffman was the partner in crime of James Gregory Marlow (also on death row). They killed four women from October to November 1986. They were arrested on November 14, 1986. Officers were summoned to a Big Bear City lodge but Coffman and Marlow were not immediately located.
A posse of 100 individuals found the two suspects hiking on a mountain road about 3 p.m. that day and took them into custody. Thirty-two months passed before the trial opened on July 18, 1989. Both defendants were sentenced to death on August 30, 1989.
Coffman had the distinction of being the first female sentenced to die in the state since California restored capital punishment in 1977.
MOST RECENT ADDITIONS
John Wayne Thomson (File Photo)
On April 17, 2014, John Wayne Thomson, 54, was received at San Quentin. The Cajon Pass murderer was sentenced to death for the 2006 fatal stabbing of Charles Ray Hedlund, 55. Hedlund, a Beaumont businessman, stopped on the side of the road in the Cajon Pass to assist Thomson.
Rickie Lee Fowler (YouTube)
Old Fire arsonist and murder Rickie Lee Fowler, 32, was sentenced to death January 28, 2013, and arrived at San Quentin on February 5, 2013. Fowler was convicted August 15,2013, of five counts of first-degree murder and two counts of arson related to the Old Fire in 2003.
Fowler’s five murder convictions were for residents in burn areas who died from heart attacks that prosecutors said were brought on by the stress of evacuation and threats to their homes and belongings.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
With the average annual cost of a death row inmate pegged at about $175,000 each, that means taxpayers are paying over $7 million just for the inmates from the county. The cost to incarcerate a regular California prison inmate is $47,421 annually, according to the Department of Corrections.
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