Peterson "Death Penalty, OT. Options

[Alison Baker]

Scott Peterson sentenced to DEATH !

[Rgreen914]

Allow me to share some information taken from the pages of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and also some from my career with the California Department of Corrections. San Quentin is currently home to 630 inmates living on "Condemned Row"; CCWF at Chowchilla (Central California Women's Facility) is the home for the 11 female inmates currently under death sentence. The paper claims, "the state has executed just 10 inmates since it resumed capital punishment in 1978, a period in which 38 condemned inmates have died of other means." Of these, "three were killed by other inmates, a dozen committed suicide and the rest died of natural causes." The paper goes on to say, "of the 38 states with the death penalty, California has the greatest number of prisoners on Death Row and moves the slowest toward executions. None of ...(the) Death Row inmates has (yet) finished the mandatory court challenges." Once Peterson is sentenced to death, "he will sit on Death Row for more than five years before being appointed an attorney for his first and mandatory appeal to the California Supreme Court." He would then "join more than 200 others who do not yet have lawyers." ("There are too many inmates with too few lawyers willing to volunteer for the relatively low-paying job. Unlike in many states, California requires the lawyers to have rigorous capital litigation training.") Once his state appeals are exhausted, his case "would move to the federal courts, usually with a new appelate attorney." The case would then go to the district court and then to the infamous, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco. Eventually, it might end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
He will be housed in San Mateo County Jail while the Probation Department prepares a "Probation and Sentencing Report", though I can't imagine what they could possibly include in their report that hasn't been brought out in the trial. He will return to court for sentencing in February and will then be transported to San Quentin by San Mateo County deputies [assuming the Judge doesn't reduce the sentence to Life With Out (Parole) LWO]. Once he arrives in Quentin, he will then become the "property" of the Department of Corrections and be assigned a prison number. Assume that Peterson will be on "suicide watch" for most of his first few months at Quentin; he will most likely be totally isolated from the other condemned inmates due to his notoriety. The normal ratio of inmates to correctional officers is about 200 to 1 but I don't know if that holds true on Condemned Row. Nevertheless, I doubt Peterson's life would be worth much among his condemned neighbors, after all, they can only execute you once! And trust me...in his worst nightmares, he has never seen the kind of neighbors he will have at Q!!!

Ron Balderrama