Death Row

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his lawyers have switched strategies in the legal battle to resume executions, agreeing to submit revised lethal injection protocols for public review rather than continue appealing state court decisions that the redrafted rules are illegal. Although the move is intended to speed up a return of capital punishment, conservative law-and-order advocates and victims' rights groups expressed frustration over the persistent delays.

When Tuesday's hearings in Sacramento on proposed changes in California's method of executing convicted murderers veered into a discussion of why solutions to the state's budget crisis ought to include the abolition of capital punishment, it was another example of how divided our attitude on this issue remains.

The killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl who has spent 22 years fighting execution has died on death row, escaping what the victim's father termed "the justice the world deserved." Thomas Francis Edwards, 65, died of natural causes Saturday at San Quentin State Prison's medical facility, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported Monday.

A jailed drug dealer and his bankrupt wife allegedly duped a Los Angeles judge to obtain a $130-million default ruling against Death Row Records chief Marion "Suge" Knight, according to a legal motion expected to be the focus of a hearing today in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The California Supreme Court appeared ready Wednesday to reject an innocence claim from a death row inmate, despite evidence that a key witness in the murder case may have been telling the truth when he said the defendant was not guilty. During arguments, three of the seven justices who spoke indicated that they would follow the conclusion of a trial judge, known as a "referee," who was appointed by the court to hear inmate Dennis Lawley's claims of innocence.

For two years, Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide investigators have worked to identify 47 women whose pictures were taken three decades ago by a Westside photographer later convicted of killing two models. It has been a search that crossed the country and, at its height, consumed half the sheriff's Homicide Bureau. Officials eventually eliminated all but 14 women as potential victims.

The California Supreme Court upheld the death penalty Monday for a man whose professed innocence was bolstered late last year by the discovery of a gun buried in mud in a Modesto field. Though unanimously rejecting Dennis Lawley's constitutional challenge of his conviction and death sentence, the state high court said he could once again try to prove his innocence by presenting a new petition based on the discovery of the gun.

I almost died for someone else's crime. Had the jury listened to the prosecutor, I would have been sent to death row, and even might have been executed by now. Instead, I spent nearly 20 years in prison before new evidence proved my innocence and I was able to walk away a free man. I'm far from the only one who lost decades of my life wrongfully imprisoned. Dozens like me have been exonerated by DNA or other new evidence.

After 14 years on death row, an inmate whose murder convictions were thrown out because investigators had withheld evidence walked out of prison Wednesday a free man. Glen Edward Chapman, 41, was released from Central Prison shortly after 3 p.m. and ate a bologna and cheese sandwich -- a meal his mother used to make. He used a cellphone for the first time to talk to his father, sister and nieces he's never met. "I'm still shocked, but I feel good," Chapman said.

If a respected entertainment lawyer had not decided 20 years ago to devote a substantial chunk of his life and work to helping a California death row inmate -- for free -- Adam Miranda would be dead by now. A document that could well have reduced Miranda's sentence had it not purposely or accidentally been kept from defense lawyers never would have come to light. Miranda's most recent petition for habeas corpus likely would have been rejected, just like the ones in 1987, 1989 and 1993.