California Calls Off the Scheduled Execution of Albert Greenwood Brown – FINALLY

Albert Greenwood Brown, the next to die under California Death Penalty law?

After many days of legal maneuvers and machinations, the scheduled execution of Albert Greenwood Brown has been called off by the State of California.

State officials called off the scheduled execution of a convicted murderer Wednesday, hours after the California Supreme Court intervened in the case and made it all but impossible to carry out the death sentence.

The attorney general’s office had begun the day by asking a federal appeals court to allow the execution of Albert Greenwood Brown Jr. to proceed but later asked the court to dismiss the request. Brown had been scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at 9 p.m. Thursday.

“A new execution date will be sought in accordance with applicable law and in conformity with all court orders,” said Christine Gasparac, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.

The high court said a separate challenge of the state’s protocol for lethal injection remains pending, and the state cannot proceed until that is resolved. That challenge was brought by other death row inmates in Marin County Superior Court.

And, since the appeal will not be decided by Friday when the sodium thiopental drug expires, California will not be able to execute Brown or any other inmate on Death row until sometime during the first quarter of 2011.

In the meantime, while the California Supreme Court was working its will, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied Browm clemency.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied a request for clemency Wednesday for a convicted murderer and rapist at the center of a frenetic legal battle over whether California should resume executions after a nearly five-year gap.

Attorneys for Albert Greenwood Brown had asked the governor to reduce his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, arguing that jurors in his 1982 murder trial never heard about the full extent of the mental impairment that affected his ability to control his impulses.

But Schwarzenegger noted that other courts had reviewed the same evidence and concluded it would not have affected the outcome of Brown’s trial. In addition, the governor cited the brutality of Brown’s crime and the “overwhelming” evidence pointing to his guilt.

Brown was convicted of raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl. Prosecutors accused him of making taunting phone calls to the victim’s mother after the girl vanished.

“The guilt and aggravating evidence is overwhelming, and the mitigation evidence is just the opposite,” Schwarzenegger wrote in his clemency denial. “Brown’s jury reasonably concluded that a penalty of death was appropriate in this case, and I have no reason to disagree.”

But, alas, Brown will NOT be executed tomorrow and all of his criminal cronies at San Quentin Death Row will have another Thanksgiving and Christmas season to enjoy while the state and federal courts consider numerous appeals and the California Department of Corrections attempts to restock its stockpile of sodium thiopental. Too bad the victims murdered by Brown and the other murderers will not receive the justice that is due them. Many of said victims have been waiting thirty years or more.

A travesty of justice.

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