(Continued from page 16)

• Executions in California have been on hold for years while appellate courts consider the legality of the three-drug protocol now in place in the state.
• Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler heard extensive arguments and ordered lawyers to return to court Sept. 10 for further proceedings.
• "I do have concerns whether I have the authority to do what the district attorney wants me to do," the judge said. "If I have the authority to order a one-drug execution do I also have the authority to use the gas chamber or order a firing squad?"
• District Attorney Steve Cooley has suggested a virtual end-run around the current logjam in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal over the way executions are done.
• Deputy District Attorney Michelle Hanisee said the three drugs used previously are no longer available and a pharmaceutical company plans to stop making one of them.

• "The manufacture of the drug will expire in 2014 and we will never be able to use that protocol again," she said. "We have a single drug method which they can use now."
• Deputy Attorney General Jay Goldman said the 9th Circuit has not approved the one-drug method.
• Hanissey said the firing squad was long ago ruled cruel and unusual punishment, but the court could order an execution "by any means currently authorized."
• Cooley's motion involves the execution of two murderers who have been on death row for more than 25 years.
• Mitchell Sims and Tiequon Cox have exhausted all of their appeals. Cox, a gang member, was convicted of shooting a grandmother, her daughter and two grandchildren in 1984. Sims was convicted of shooting a pizza deliveryman in Glendale in 1985 after killing two co-workers at a pizza restaurant in Hanahan, S.C.
• He fled to California with his girlfriend, who also was convicted and is serving a life sentence. He also faces a death sentence in South Carolina.
• The last execution in California was in 2006, the same year that a federal judge imposed a moratorium following complaints that the three-drug method was causing excruciating pain and was cruel and unusual punishment. A state ruling in 2011 cited the same issue in suggesting that the method did not comply with the state Administrative Procedures Act.
• There have also been objections from the medical community to having medical personnel including anesthesiologists participate in executions.
• The moratorium is expected to last into 2013. In the interim, voters face a ballot initiative in November that would replace the death penalty with life in prison without

(Continued on page 18)