By Howard Mintz
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A dozen years ago, state prison officials opened up this infamous death row for a tour to demonstrate the crumbling, overcrowded cells housing the 600 killers then awaiting execution.
Puddles of water sat on the cold, dank floors, as California leaders worried that the nation’s largest death row would run out of space.
On Tuesday, prison officials unlocked death row for media inspection once again -- and it seemed time had stopped.
There are now 745 condemned killers, with no realistic projection for when San Quentin’s lethal injection chamber might reopen for business.
There hasn’t been an execution here in a decade. The state has abandoned its expensive plans to build a new, larger death row.
As life on death row unfolded Tuesday, from notorious murderer Scott Peterson playing basketball in the exercise yard to “Trailside Killer” David Carpenter sitting on a bed in his cramped cell, San Quentin’s experiment with the death penalty is at a critical juncture.
California voters next fall will be asked again to abolish capital punishment, while another proposed ballot measure seeks to speed up the state’s notoriously slow appeals system. And state prison officials are trying to resolve years of legal battles by switching to a single-drug execution method that may or may not satisfy the courts and pave the way for the resumption of executions.
The inmates themselves appear to be about as conflicted about their fate as the general public. In death row’s five-tiered unit where more than 500 of the inmates live in 6-by-9-foot single cells, the killers were quick to bark about the dismal conditions, although others turned their backs to reporters.
Richard Allen Davis, the killer of Petaluma preteen Polly Klaas and the inspiration for the state’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, waved off questioners from his first-floor cell.
But Joseph Michael Nissensohn, sentenced to die two years ago for the murder of two Monterey County teen girls and a Lake Tahoe girl, captures the irony of California’s death row. Even if the state resumes executions, Nissensohn, beginning a 25- to 30-year trip through the appeals process at 64 years old, knows he’s unlikely to die by lethal injection.
“By the time they get to me, I’ll be long gone,” he said through his cell bars.
Charles Edward Crawford, sentenced to die in Alameda County in 2002 for killing a 16-year-old San Jose girl and a Fremont man, summed up life awaiting execution in California this way: “It’s like an abstract thought.”
He made the comment as he worked out in an exercise yard in the so-called Adjustment Center, where inmates are sent for disciplinary reasons.
Inside that unit -- where face screens and protective vests are required to protect guards against incidents such as inmates flinging urine and feces -- prison guards told reporters they are always on high alert.
“It’s always uncomfortable,” said one veteran guard who asked not to be named.
Ron Davis, San Quentin’s warden, said the prison has found innovative new ways to accommodate the burgeoning death row, whose population is now only reduced by suicides and natural deaths.
California has opened a 40-inmate psychiatric unit, the first of its kind for any death row in the nation, to treat inmates suffering from the worst mental illnesses. And the prison is about to open a new 100-inmate wing on existing prison grounds to shift some of the death row population.
Sixty-eight of the killers are in the choicest of death row units, the “North Block,” where those condemned killers with the longest stretches of good behavior are housed. That includes Peterson, sentenced to die in 2004 for killing his wife, Laci. Peterson turned his back on reporters in the exercise yard, where he was wearing basketball sneakers, sunglasses and a wool cap.
Steve Livaditis, on death row since 1987 for three Los Angeles murders, concedes the unit is a reward. “It’s a less stressful environment,” he said.
But while San Quentin’s death row marches on, long after the state restored the death penalty in 1978, other inmates there have a different view of their infinite wait to be escorted into the lethal injection chamber.
“It doesn’t bother me,” said Robert Galvan, sentenced to die four years ago for killing a fellow inmate at Corcoran State Prison. “If it’s my time, it’s my time.”
Copyright 2015 the San Jose Mercury News