Death Row

White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence. It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all. Although executions are carried out with comparative speed in states such as Virginia, where Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad was put to death Tuesday night, capital punishment in California has become so bogged down by legal challenges as to be a nearly empty threat, say experts on both sides of the issue.

Sundance Channel's "Rectify" is the first and possibly only television show one can imagine Flannery O'Connor blogging about. It isn't just good TV, it's revelatory TV. The genre's biggest potential game changer since AMC debuted the one-two punch of "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad. " "Television can do that?" we asked in wonder as Don Draper squinted in cultural allegory over his Scotch on the rocks. Yes it can, and now, thanks to creator Ray McKinnon and the cast of "Rectify," television can also immerse the viewer in a gloriously rich and careful study of how endurance and faith, strength and surrender, fear and serenity balance to form the essential nature of humanity.

On a Sunday morning in June 1983, Bill Hughes arrived at a hilltop home in Chino Hills, concerned that his young son hadn't returned home in time for church after a sleepover. Hughes had called from his own home nearby but had gotten no answer. No one stirred when he knocked on the back door. Stepping over to the master bedroom window for a glimpse inside, he was confronted by horrific carnage. The bloodied bodies of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and his son, 11-year-old Christopher, lay strewn from bedroom to hallway.

A condemned man on California's death row for murdering five people, including the daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop, is dead in what prison officials say they are investigating as a suicide. Justin Helzer, 41, was found dead Sunday in his cell, where he was housed alone at San Quentin State Prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. His brother, also condemned, is incarcerated at the same prison. He and his older brother, Glenn Helzer, and roomate Dawn Godman were convicted in 2005 for a robbery and killing rampage that prosecutors said started with an attempt to extort $100,000 from an elderly Concord couple.

Michael Clarke Duncan, the tall and massively built actor with the shaved head and deep voice who received an Academy Award nomination for his moving portrayal of a gentle death row inmate in the 1999 prison drama "The Green Mile," died Monday. He was 54. Duncan died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to a statement from his publicist, Joy Fehily. He had suffered a heart attack in July and did not recover. A former ditch digger for a natural gas company in his native Chicago, Duncan began his Hollywood saga as a celebrity bodyguard in the mid-1990s.

After a week of searching through swampy, bug-swarming river bottoms, law officers hunting death row inmate Martin E. Gurule finally found their man Thursday--dead, beneath a bridge over the Trinity River near Huntsville, with tantalizing hints about how he'd made his way over the prison's two razor-wired security fences. The body of Gurule, 29, was swathed in cardboard and two sets of heavy underwear, according to officials.

Director Lee Daniels has a habit of falling madly in love with characters nobody else wants, out of an underclass littered with sociopaths, psychopaths and their victims. He has done it again in the sweat-soaked noir of "The Paperboy. " It's the Florida Everglades of the 1960s, and there is nothing friendly about this place, including the backcountry alligator skinner on death row, the chippy who's fallen for him, or the journalists intent on saving him. An exceptional cast led by Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron and John Cusack gives these tawdry miscreants a scuzzy, sexy, sad reality that is as unerring as it is unnerving.

From afar, California in a presidential election year is defined by and largely written off because of its color: not golden but deep, Democratic blue. This perception, however, doesn't do justice to the contests taking place in the state. Over the last several months, readers have sent The Times hundreds of letters weighing the 11 initiatives on the Nov. 6 ballot. The discussion has been spirited, especially on Proposition 30 (Gov. Jerry Brown's tax increase) and Proposition 34 (which would do away with the death penalty)

Re "Cruel isolation," Opinion, Oct. 18 Shane Bauer shines a rare light on solitary confinement in our prisons, a punishment that for those so incarcerated is truly a fate worse than death. Those who vote for Proposition 34 to end capital punishment, while absolving themselves of complicity in taking a human life, should realize that in many cases sitting on death row will be replaced by such torture. It is because execution is so disturbing that California has mandated extra assurance that the sentence is just, including expensive automatic appeals.

Thomas Francis Edwards died a week ago Saturday of natural causes at age 65. That may not sound strange until you consider that Edwards, the convicted killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl, had been on death row for 22 years. That's right. Two decades later, the state of California still hadn't carried out a sentence imposed in the mid-1980s. And there's nothing unusual about that.

Japan hanged three convicted killers, its Justice Ministry said Thursday. The hangings are the first executions under the new government, continuing a secretive practice that has appalled human rights groups and made Japan an outlier among wealthy democracies. The three inmates were identified in Japanese media as Masahiro Kanagawa, convicted in a string of stabbings five years ago; Keiki Kano, sentenced for murdering a bar owner; and Kaoru Kobayashi, convicted of abducting and killing a 7-year-old girl.

A British woman who tried to smuggle several pounds of cocaine into Bali was sentenced Tuesday to death, a far more severe punishment than the 15 years behind bars sought by Indonesian prosecutors.  The court found there were  "no mitigating circumstances" to allow leniency for Lindsay Sandiford, Agence France-Presse reported . Her actions could tarnish Bali as a tourist destination, the judges reportedly said. Sandiford, 56, is the second British citizen in recent months to receive a death sentence for drug crimes in Indonesia.

Even as Californians voted to maintain the death penalty, the nation's support for capital punishment continued to wane in 2012, with relatively few states performing executions. Only nine states executed inmates in 2012, and three-fourths of the executions occurred in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a monitoring group critical of capital punishment. Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish capital punishment.

Re “ Voter reaction mixed on raft of initiatives ,” Nov. 7 The people of California have spoken: “Like the inmates on death row, we also believe that killing someone is the answer to a problem.” We have become what we abhor. George Horan Los Angeles More letters to the editor ...    

For The Times' editorial board, Tuesday's election contained a lot of victories: 15, to be precise. That's the number of ballot measures or candidates endorsed by The Times that emerged victorious, compared with just four races in which our picks lost. But one of the losses was particularly tough, given that it was on an issue this paper's editorial page has been backing since the early 1970s: replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. Backers of Proposition 34 can't be faulted for thinking the time was right for a referendum on capital punishment.

From afar, California in a presidential election year is defined by and largely written off because of its color: not golden but deep, Democratic blue. This perception, however, doesn't do justice to the contests taking place in the state. Over the last several months, readers have sent The Times hundreds of letters weighing the 11 initiatives on the Nov. 6 ballot. The discussion has been spirited, especially on Proposition 30 (Gov. Jerry Brown's tax increase) and Proposition 34 (which would do away with the death penalty)

Re "300th prisoner freed by DNA testing," Oct. 1 The NFL's replacement referees blow a game-deciding call and it's decried as the unthinkable finally happening. The calamity is front-page news and even commands the attention of the White House. But the news that yet another person on death row has been freed based on DNA evidence, the 18th death row inmate and 300th overall, elicits barely a yawn and is buried inside The Times. The "bad calls" by prosecutors, judges, juries and appellate courts in each of these cases surely merit a little more attention and perhaps a little more analysis of how and why they were made.

Last year, California added 28 inmates to the state's death row, eight of whom were sentenced in Los Angeles County. They aren't in much danger of an early demise, however, thanks largely to legal delays, including a decision Tuesday by state officials not to pursue executions in 2011. The seemingly never-ending court battles mean that convicts in capital cases are far more likely to die of natural causes than by lethal injection. But that won't stop them from costing taxpayers an estimated three times more than other inmates.

Re "Debating Proposition 34," opinion, Oct. 28 Jimmy Carter has the chutzpah to write "The process for administering the death penalty in the United States is broken beyond repair. " The biggest problem with California's capital punishment law from 1987 to the present has been the judges appointed to the federal district courts and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by none other than Carter. Once again, we are told the system is broken - by one of the key people who broke it. Fortunately, the "beyond repair" part is wrong.

Police and death row inmates agree on one thing, a law enforcement group told its members: They both oppose next week's ballot measure to replace the death penalty with life without parole. That statement, in a newsletter from the Los Angeles Police Protective League opposing Proposition 34, highlighted what some California criminal defense lawyers have been saying for months. Many death row inmates who are years away from execution would rather gamble on being executed than lose their state-paid lawyers, a preference that seems to be confirmed by a limited, informal survey of some on California's death row. VOTER GUIDE: 2012 California Propositions "That is a significant sentiment, since the death penalty in California is mostly life without parole anyway," said Don Specter, director of California's Prison Law Office, who personally supports the initiative.