SAN FRANCISCO — San Quentin Prison’s warden walked to the death row cell of Albert Greenwood Brown on Aug. 31 and read a warrant informing him of his scheduled execution this week.
Prison staff then examined the convicted rapist and murderer to ensure his veins were healthy enough to handle a lethal injection scheduled for Wednesday.
And, then, just as quickly, a federal judge Friday refused to block the execution or reconsider the decision Saturday.
With that, Brown made a surprising leap to the top of the long list of California death row inmates facing execution. Certainly, it was unforeseen by legal experts, by the federal judge who halted executions in 2006 and by Brown’s own attorneys.
The attorneys wasted no time in blaming election-year politics, saying that Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office initiated the execution because the state’s top lawyer is locked in a tight campaign battle with Republican Meg Whitman.
Jerry Brown’s campaign called the charge “patently false.” For the past five years, defense attorneys have assumed that no executions would be scheduled until another death row inmate’s challenge to the state lethal injection process was decided. Michael Morales came within two hours of being executed in 2006.
He was thought to be at the top of the list, and his lawsuit was viewed as a test case.
But the attorney general’s office and county prosecutors are also pursuing execution dates for several other death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals. Albert Brown’s lawyers said that violates an informal agreement to wait on the outcome of Morales’ challenge.
“I had personal assurances from the state to that effect,” Brown’s co-counsel, John Grele, told a federal judge Tuesday in a bid to delay his client’s execution.
An attorney general spokeswoman said “there was never such an agreement.”
During his campaign for attorney general — and now for governor — Jerry Brown promised to “enforce the laws” of California, including defending the death penalty. Defense lawyers and others see the newly scheduled execution as a way for Brown to woo fence-sitting voters who favor the death penalty.
Albert Brown was convicted of the 1980 rape and murder of 15-year-old Susan Jordan, who was abducted on her way home from school.
Killer taunted victim’s mother, police say
Albert Greenwood Brown was convicted of abducting 15-year-old Susan Jordan on her way home from school and raping and killing her in Riverside, Calif., in 1980. Investigators said he called Jordan’s mother several times on the day of her disappearance, taunting her with messages that she would never see her daughter alive again. He has been on death row since his 1982 conviction.
California’s last execution was in 2006.
The Associated Press
