California prison officials have filed proposed new guidelines for lethal injection, a step towards resuming executions in a state that has not carried one out since 2006.



The most populous US state – where public support for the death penalty has been slipping for years – stopped executing prisoners after Clarence Ray Allen was put to death nearly 10 years ago for three murders in Fresno.

The state put executions on hold partly because of legal issues, including a lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of the three-drug mixture used for lethal injections.

But politicians in California also have not wanted to force the issue in a state where many top officeholders, including the attorney general, oppose the death penalty. A slim majority of voters, about 56%, support it, the lowest number in years according to a Field Poll in 2014.

This year the state said it would not appeal a court order halting executions until a single-drug protocol could be developed.

On Tuesday the proposed method, details of which were not released, were filed with the state Office of Administrative Law for review, said Jeffrey Callison, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. They would become public next week, Callison said.

The California governor, Jerry Brown, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters about whether he would push to begin conducting executions again.

The proposed new protocol wouldbe open to input from the public starting next week and it could take up to a year for the rules to be finalized, said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the corrections department.

Since Allen’s execution in January of 2006, California juries have sentenced 181 people to death, according to statistics provided by the corrections department.

But California did not rush to execute prisoners even before legal questions arose about the three-drug mixture, which has led to botched executions in Oklahoma and other states.

Since 1978, when the death penalty was reinstated, California has executed 13 people. Sixty-nine inmates have died of natural causes while on death row and 24 have killed themselves. Still awaiting execution are 747 prisoners.

With Reuters