California is closing San Quentin’s death row. This is its gruesome history
LOS ANGELES — Could this be the end of the line for the end of the line?
Three years after an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom slammed the brakes on executions in California, which hasn’t put anyone to death in 16 years anyway, California’s death row is about to be slowly dismantled. Its 737 residents, all still technically under sentence of death, are slowly being moved away from the condemned cells at San Quentin, a place where California has, by three successive methods — the noose, the gas and the needle — put men and women to death since 1893.
These slow-mo evictions are what voters OK'd in 2016 when, at the same time they ordered the state to speed up the death penalty, they also agreed to moving the condemned to other prisons, emptying out the most infamous section of one of the most infamous prisons in the nation.
The California death penalty has whipsawed the state’s politics and laws and voters for decades. Over that time, sentiment has swung back and forth. Ballot measures to ban it outright have crept closer to winning. Yet just let a court throw out a particular execution method, or any executions at all, and voters or legislators will put the death penalty right back on the books again.
One California chief justice, Rose Bird, voted to overturn every death penalty case she reviewed. She
