18 California Condemned Inmates Have Exhausted Appeals.

California Propositions 66 and 62 were on the November 8, 2016 ballot.  A YES vote on 66 supported changing the procedures governing state court appeals and petitions that challenge death penalty convictions and sentences. A NO vote means the state's system for governing death penalty appeals and petitions go unchanged.

Proposition 66 intends to speed up executions by designating trial courts to hear petitions challenging death row convictions, limiting successive petitions and expanding the pool of lawyers who could take on death penalty appeals.  It also included provisions for victim compensation.

Whereas, Proposition 62 would have replaced capital punishment  for murder with life in prison without parole.   Proposition 66 passed with 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent.  Proposition 62 failed to pass.

California death penalty opponents filed a taxpayer suit the next day on November 9th to block Proposition 66 from going into effect. Once again those opposed to the death penalty refuse to respect the will of the people.  Moving forward with implementing state law has been postponed pending a decision by the California Supreme Court.

The following California Condemned inmates have exhausted all their appeals and are ready to be executed if the California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 66.

Age: 65

Sentenced: Nov. 30, 1989

Time on death row: 27 years, 1 month

Ayala was convicted of triple homicide in 1988 for killing three men and wounding a fourth during an attempted robbery of A & Z Auto Repair being used as a distribution point for heroin.  The victims’ hands had been bound behind their backs as Ayala and his brother demanded $10,000. Three were shot to death, while a fourth was able to escape wounded.

Age: 55

Sentenced: Oct. 6, 1982

Time on death row: 34 years, 3 months

In 1981 Belmontes beat a 19-year-old girl to death during a robbery of her house in San Joaquin County. Belmontes drove to the home of an acquaintance, hoping to steal her stereo while she was out. She was home and in an effort to do away with the only witness to his crime, Belmontes pounded her head 15 to 20 times with an iron dumbbell, crushing her skull. The victims parents arrived home later to find their 19-year-old daughter dead on the floor in a pool of blood. Meanwhile, Belmontes and two accomplices had sold the stolen stereo for $100 and bought some beer.

Age: 62

Sentenced: Feb. 22, 1982

Time on death row: 34 years, 10 months

Three years after he raped a 14-year-old girl, Brown raped and strangled a 15-year-old girl as she walked to school. Brown had been posing as a jogger along the route. After dragging her to an orange grove, he brutally raped and sodomized her and strangled her to death with her own shoelace.

Age: 58

Sentenced: May 15, 1985

Time on death row: 31 years, 7 months

After escaping from a prison camp, Cooper killed four people sleeping in a house in which he was hiding and used a hatchet to dismember some of the bodies. A mother, father, daughter and a boy from the neighborhood were killed. A son survived having his throat slit.

Age: 50

Sentenced: Apr. 30, 1986

Time on death row: 30 years, 8 months

Cox and his accomplices sought to carry out a contract killing. They went to the wrong address and executed an NFL football player 's mother, sister and two nephews. On death row, Cox stabbed another condemned inmate, and he was part of a 2000 escape attempt. Alexander is one of the most prominent voices behind Proposition 66, which would speed the appeals process and allow faster executions.

Age: 51

Sentenced: Jun. 16, 1989

Time on death row: 27 years, 6 months 

Cunningham killed a man he met at a bar after following him and a partner to the parking lot and demanding their money.  The victims left the bar and proceeded to the parking lot behind the bar.  Cunningham approached the two, drew a gun, demanded cash, and then fatally shot one victim. The other victim attempted to flee, and Cunningham shot him in the thigh. 

Age: 63

Sentenced: Nov. 10, 1982

Time on death row: 34 years, 2 months

Despondent over a breakup, Deere killed his girlfriend's brother and the man's two children.  Deere threatened his girlfriend he would kill her family if she left him.  Deere was waiting for his victim when he showed up at his trailer. Deere fired a fatal shot from a .22-caliber rifle into his right eye. Deere did not expect to find the victim’s daughters at the home. The girls knew Deere well and would call him Uncle Ronnie. Deere killed them both with the same rifle so there would be no witnesses.

Age: 64

Sentenced: Sep. 5, 1989

Time on death row: 27 years, 4 months

After sexually assaulting one woman, Fairbank tortured and killed a second woman in his apartment, then dumped her in the woods and set her body on fire. Four days before the murder, a San Francisco judge had released Fairbank without bail after his arrest on a rape charge.

Age: 60

Sentenced: Aug. 21, 1979

Time on death row: 37 years, 4 months
Paroled from prison after manslaughter conviction, Fields went on a three-week crime rampage, robbing five people and killing one of them after holding her captive in his bedroom for several days.

Age: 79

Sentenced: Aug. 8, 1986

Time on death row: 30 years, 5 months

Hayes took $250,000 from two people who sought to buy cocaine and then lured them to a remote part of a Santa Cruz college campus for the promised delivery. He had dug shallow graves ahead of time and shot the two, chopping off their heads and hands before burying them.

Age: 68

Sentenced: Mar. 30, 1981

Time on death row: 35 years, 9 months
Heishman raped a woman and, three months later while he was free on bail, killed her to prevent her from testifying against him in a criminal trial.

Age: 67

Sentenced: Sep. 23, 1983

Time on death row: 33 years, 3 months
Seeking revenge on an old acquaintance, Mickey returned from a military base in Japan and robbed and murdered the man and his 18-year-old girlfriend.

Age: 56

Sentenced: Jun. 14, 1983

Time on death row: 33 years, 6 months
Morales attempted to strangle a woman with his belt until it broke, beat her repeatedly on the head with a hammer, dragged her body to a field and raped her, and finally stabbed her four times in the chest to ensure she was dead.

Age: 62

Sentenced: Mar. 5, 1982

Time on death row: 34 years, 10 months

Payton raped and murdered a woman at the boarding house where he had lived with his wife, and attempted to murder another woman and her son with a butcher knife, stabbing them more than 60 times.

Age: 57

Sentenced: Jun. 4, 1984

Time on death row: 32 years, 7 months

Pinholster stabbed to death two men during a 1982 drug robbery. His lawyer claimed childhood brain injuries left Pinholster unstable and he was institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital as a child. The 9th Circuit overturned his death sentence, but a divided U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 2011, saying federal judges had overstepped their bounds in second-guessing the state court.

Age: 63

Sentenced: Jun. 28, 1988

Time on death row: 28 years, 6 months

Samayoa killed a woman and her 2-year-old daughter during a home-invasion robbery. According to the evidence in Samoyoa’s trial, the woman was struck in the face a number of times and the baby was hit at least three times.

Age 56

Sentenced: Sep. 11, 1987

Time on death row: 29 years, 4 months

Sims and a partner killed a pizza delivery man, stole his uniform and then robbed the pizza restaurant where he worked, locking employees in a locker.

Age: 72

Sentenced: Jul. 15, 1986

Time on death row: 30 years, 5 months

Sully, a former police officer from Millbrae, ran an escort service. He killed five women and one man during a series of cocaine-related crimes, torturing and holding victims captive in a warehouse.

Alfred Wells Helped His Executioner.

Alfred Wells was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber that he had helped install.

 In 1937, Wells was serving time for burglary when the chamber arrived.    He welded pipes, tubes, and installed gauges.  Wells would later tell other inmates, "That's the closest I ever want to come to the gas chamber." 

In 1939 he was paroled and over the next couple of years was involved in various petty crimes. In 1941 he killed his half-brother, the brother's wife and another woman in San Bernardino.     

The murders were a result of a family dispute over an incestuous relationship between Wells and his half sister Violet Wells. After the family removed Violet from the home of Wells he became enraged and went on a killing spree. 

Prior to his trial, Wells made an escape attempt using a gun carved out of soap. He was sent back to San Quentin where he knew what awaited him.  While on deathrow Wells became disruptive by setting fires, flooding his cell, attempting to stab guards, and attempting suicide twice.  The guards and inmates alike hated him. 

On December 4, 1942, Wells entered the gas chamber six years after he helped build it, and drew his last breath.  At 10:12 am. he was pronounced dead.  He was 32 years old.

Botched Execution of Rattlesnake James.

Major Raymond Lisenba was the last condemned inmate to be hanged at San Quentin State Prison.

 Major Raymond “Rattlesnake James” Lisenba (March 6, 1894 – May 1, 1942) was charged with murdering his fourth wife, Mary Emma James, his third wife, Winona Wallace, and nephew, Cornelius Wright, to collect their life insurance benefits.

  James staged a vehicle accident involving Winona Wallace that fell 150 feet down a raven.  He was able to jump free but his wife was trapped at the wheel.  She unfortunately survived with only a massive head wound behind her ear.  She however didn't survive drowning a week later.  They later found shreds of a bullet in her head during the autopsy.

Cornelius Wright was visiting James while on leave from the military.  James lent him his car and Wright later died after driving off a cliff.  The mechanic who towed the wreck back to James told him that something was wrong with the steering wheel.  

  James final victim was Mary Emma James. She was tied to the kitchen table with her eyes and mouth taped shut.  Her foot was forced inside a box containing two deadly rattle snakes.  When the poisonous venom didn't kill her James drowned her in the bath tube.  Police found her body next to their fish pond in the backyard to make it look like an accident.  She was pregnant at the time.

Clinton Duffy, Warden of San Quentin  between 1940 and 1952.

  Warden Clinton Duffy witnessed the execution and described the mayhem that followed the botched and gruesome execution.

  "The man hit bottom and I observed that he was fighting by pulling on the straps, wheezing, whistling, trying to get air, that blood was oozing through the black cap. I observed also that he urinated, defecated, and droppings fell on the floor, and the stench was terrible".  (This is not abnormal in death by slow hanging as the person slowly strangles)

  "I also saw witnesses pass out and have to be carried from the witness room. Some of them threw up." It took ten minutes for the condemned man to die.

When he was taken down and the cap removed, "big hunks of flesh were torn off" the side of his face where the noose had been, "his eyes were popped," and his tongue was "swollen and hanging from his mouth." His face had turned purple". After this fiasco the state adopted the gas chamber as its primary method for executions.