Hot from having successfully opposed last year’s ballot measure to abolish California’s death penalty, prosecutors now are pushing legislation to put condemned inmates to death faster.

The two bills by state Sen. Joel Anderson, R-El Cajon, and sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association, will be heard next Tuesday, April 30 by the state Senate Public Safety Committee.

“Removing unnecessary impediments to carrying out the punishment meted out by judges and juries will ensure timely justice,” Anderson said in a news release. “It is clear that the death penalty needs reforming when condemned inmates are often living longer on death row than their victims did their entire lives.”

SB 779 makes various reforms including speeding up the appointment of appellate counsel and certification of the record, which under current law can take years. SCA 13 would let California’s appellate courts hear death penalty appeals; for now, only the state Supreme Court hears them, creating a legal bottleneck.

CDAA last year opposed Proposition 34, which would have repealed the death penalty; the initiative was rejected by 52 percent of voters in November. The initiative’s supporters had argued in part that capital punishment is too costly for the state to afford, given the many years of legal wrangling and special incarceration that it requires.

“Prosecutors seek justice and stand for victims,” CDAA president Carl Adams said in the news release. “Regardless of the fate of these two bills, CDAA will continue to carry this banner and hold the state to its promise to appropriately punish the worst offenders.”

California now has 733 condemned inmates. It has executed 14 since reinstating the death penalty in 1978, with the last of those in January 2006. A federal judge later that year found the state’s lethal-injection procedure was unconstitutional because it might cause the inmate pain; new regulations were enacted in 2010 but have never been used.

Maryland lawmakers today approved what California voters narrowly rejected a few months ago: abolition of the death penalty.

The Maryland House of Delegates voted 82-56 to replace that state’s death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole; the state Senate had approved the bill 27-20 last week. Gov. Martin O’Malley had introduced the repeal legislation and so there’s no question that he’ll sign it into law now; in doing so, he’ll make Maryland the sixth state in as many years to do away with capital punishment.

“State after state is deciding that the death penalty is simply not worth the risks and costs to retain,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in a news release. “Maryland is the sixth state in recent years to choose this course, but it won’t be the last.”

California voters in November rejected Proposition 34, which like Maryland’s law would’ve replaced the death penalty with life without parole; 48 percent voted for it, 52 percent against.

The defeat came despite the elevated turnout brought by a presidential election and after supporters had reframed the issue in part as one of fiscal wisdom, arguing the tight-budgeted state can’t afford the tremendous cost of putting and keeping so many people on death row.

California now has 732 condemned inmates, but has executed only 13 since reinstating its death penalty in 1978; the last execution was in 2006. Prop. 34 would’ve commuted all currently condemned inmates’ sentences to life without parole.

Maryland has carried out five executions since 1976, but has only five inmates now on its death row. The new law won’t directly affect those five, leaving it up to O’Malley to decide whether their sentences should be commuted separately.

Three groups sued California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and San Francisco’s elections director Wednesday, asking the court to ensure that more than 85,000 people sent to county jails instead of state prisons under the recent “realignment” can vote.

All of Us or None, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and the League of Women Voters of California contend that low-level, non-violent offenders should be able to cast ballots this year and beyond.

The state’s First District Court of Appeal ruled in 2006 that people serving county jail terms as a condition of felony probation are entitled to vote under California law. Bowen in December issued a memo to county clerks and registrars advising them that no felon sentenced to county jail instead of state prison under realignment is eligible to vote. The state Justice Department backed Bowen up in a letter issued Monday.

This new lawsuit, also filed to the First District appellate court, argues people sent to county jail under realignment are neither “imprisoned in state prison” or “on parole as a result of the conviction of a felony” – the statuses under which the state constitution would deprive them of voting rights, under the 2006 case.

Excluding Californians with criminal convictions from voting is at odds with the California Constitution and contradicts a central purpose of realignment, which is to stop the state’s expensive revolving door of incarceration by rehabilitating and reintegrating individuals back into society, the lawsuit argues. The plaintiffs seek a court order letting such people register for November’s election before the Oct. 22 deadline.

Bowen’s spokeswoman said the office won’t comment on pending litigation.

The three organizations are represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Social Justice Law Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.

“California’s courts have a proud tradition of protecting our fundamental right to vote,” ACLU Managing Attorney Jory Steele said in a news release. “Here, this is particularly important because disenfranchisement has such a disproportionate impact on people of color.”

Willie “Sundiata” Tate, 67, San Leandro was behind bars from when he was 16 until age 30; now he’s a volunteer community organizer with All of Us or None, and believes that its especially important for society’s less powerful to have access to the voting booth.

“If all of us were to get out and be active, it would and could make a difference, from the community level to a society level,” he said. “As a formerly incarcerated person, it’s very dear to me that everyone who has been locked down has the chance to help put in place policies that can have a positive impact on lives of people who are incarcerated, and on people who are vulnerable to incarceration.

People risked and lost their lives so African-Americans could have the right to vote, he noted.

“Especially on issues that are local and important in the state that I live in, I want that vote,” Tate said. “And I want that vote for everyone, not just for myself.”

The Assembly voted 47-22 today to pass a Bay Area lawmaker’s bill that would lift the ban on media interviews with specific inmates in California’s prisons.

Since the ban on pre-arranged inmate interviews went into effect in 1996, bill author Tom Ammiano noted, eight versions of this bill have been vetoed by three governors.

“Independent media access to prison inmates is a critical part of keeping our prisons transparent and accountable while providing information to the public,” Ammiano, D-San Francisco, said in a news release.

“Despite the thousands of prisoners who participated in a state-wide hunger strike last year over conditions in the prisons, it was near impossible to get unbiased information about what was happening due to these restrictions,” he said. “Inmates kept in secure housing units (SHU) have no visitation or telephone privileges and information about their solitary confinement punishments are largely unknown to the public even though a disproportionate number of inmate suicides occur in the SHU.”

Ammiano said he’s carrying AB 1270 to increase transparency and public accountability from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which has a $9.2 billion budget.

Sumayyah Waheed, campaign director for the Books Not Bars program of the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said in Ammiano’s release that prisons tend to be out-of-sight, out-of-mind for anyone not directly impacted by them. “That’s a recipe for rampant abuse, which is too often the story inside prisons. As taxpayers, we have a right to know what goes on behind prison walls. This bill offers a much-needed step forward in making prisons accountable to the public.”

Full disclosure: The California Newspaper Publishers Association (of which my employer is a member) and the Pacific Media Workers Guild (of which I’m a member) among this bill’s supporters, as is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association and an array of civil-rights groups. There’s no registered opposition to it, according to an Assembly committee analysis from last week.

Still, three Democrats – Wes Chesbro, D-Arcata; Alyson Huber, D-El Dorado Hills; and Norma Torres, D-Pomona – crossed the aisle to vote with most Republicans against the bill. The only Republican who voted for it was Steve Knight, R-Palmdale. And 11 members – four Democrats and seven Republicans – didn’t vote.

The bill now goes to the state Senate.

The state Attorney General’s office has cleared for petition circulation a proposed ballot initiative that would abolish California’s death penalty, replacing it with life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

Here’s the AG’s title and summary, released yesterday:

DEATH PENALTY REPEAL. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Repeals death penalty as maximum punishment for persons found guilty of murder and replaces it with life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Applies retroactively to persons already sentenced to death. Requires persons found guilty of murder to work while in prison, with their wages to be applied to any victim restitution fines or orders against them. Creates $100 million fund to be distributed to law enforcement agencies to help solve more homicide and rape cases. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Net savings to the state and counties that could amount to the high tens of millions of dollars annually on a statewide basis due to the elimination of the death penalty. One-time state costs totaling $100 million from 2012-13 through 2015-16 to provide funding to local law enforcement agencies. (11-0035.)

The proponents have until March 19 to gather the valid signatures of at least 504,760 registered California voters in order to put this initiative on the November 2012 ballot.

This is the measure that popped up after state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, withdrew her similar bill in August, saying she couldn’t find the legislative votes to move it forward.

The California Taxpayers for Justice committee backing this “Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement (SAFE) for California Act” will roll out its petition signature gathering drive next week with press conferences Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego featuring “law enforcement leaders, murder victim family members, exonerated persons and notable campaign supporters.”

Among those speaking Tuesday in San Francisco will be 8th District Supervisor Scott Weiner; Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and now Death Penalty Focus’s executive director and this initiative’s proponent; Maurice Caldwell, released in March after serving 21 years in prison for a crime he did not commit; Deldelp Medina, whose aunt was murdered by her first cousin; and Lorrain Taylor of Oakland, founder of 1,000 Mothers to Prevent Violence and mother of twins Albade and Obadiah who were gunned down in 2000 at age 22 in a still-unsolved case.

And speakers in San Jose on Thursday will include SAFE California statewide campaign manager Natasha Minsker, who directs the ACLU of Northern California’s death penalty policy; retired Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell; John Starbuck, both the grandson and grandfather of murder victims, in separate cases; retired police officer Steven Fajardo; and Mary-Kay Raftery of San Jose, mother of a murdered law enforcement officer.

Hancock’s bill had been opposed by groups including Crime Victims United of California and the California District Attorneys Association; they and others almost certainly will oppose this proposed initiative, too.

A Field Poll released late last month found 68 percent of voters favor retaining the death penalty for serious crimes, 27 percent favor abolishing it, and 5 percent have no opinion. However, the poll also found more voters now prefer life in prison without the possibility of parole over the death penalty for someone convicted of first degree murder by a 48 percent to 40 percent margin. The poll had a 3.2-percentage-point margin of error.

State Sen. Loni Hancock today abandoned her bill that would’ve abolished California’s death penalty, even as a coalition supporting it vowed to take it to voters as a ballot measure instead.

Hancock, D-Berkeley, withdrew SB 490 from consideration by the Assembly Appropriations Committee, which was scheduled to vote on the bill today.

“The votes were not there to support reforming California’s expensive and dysfunctional death penalty system,” she said in her news release. “I had hoped we would take the opportunity to save hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to support our schools and universities, keep police on our streets and fund essential public institutions like the courts.”

SB 490 would have replaced the death penalty with life imprisonment without possibility of parole for those already condemned and for the future. Hancock chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee as well as the Budget subcommittee that oversees the criminal justice system’s funding. The bill had been opposed by groups including Crime Victims United of California and the California District Attorneys Association.

But California Taxpayers for Justice, which had been backing Hancock’s bill, said it’s far from done.

“If the California Legislature will not act to put an end to California’s death penalty debacle, and to keep California families safe, then we will. We will take immediate steps to file a ballot initiative for the November 2012 general election,” the group said in a news release; more information will be released at a news conference Monday morning in Sacramento.

Stefanie Faucher, a member of California Taxpayers for Justice and associate director of San Francisco-based Death Penalty Focus, said she and her colleagues “are confident that Californians are ready to replace the death penalty.”

Well… maybe.

A July 2010 Field Poll found 70 percent of California voters support capital punishment, up from 67 percent in 2006; this support cut across age, gender, racial, religious and party lines. The survey had a 2.8 percentage point margin of error.

However, a subsample of that same poll found that if given a choice, about as many voters would personally opt to impose a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole — 42 percent — as would choose the death penalty — 41 percent — for someone convicted of first-degree murder. This subsample had a 4.6 percentage point margin of error.

The state Senate Public Safety Committee heard testimony Tuesday from 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Arthur Alarcón and Loyola Law Professor Paula Mitchell, co-authors of the study, “Executing the Will of the Voters? – A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature’s Multi-Billion Dollar Death Penalty Debacle,” published in June. The study had concluded California has “the most expensive and least effective death penalty law in the nation.”

And last week, former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Loyola Law Professor Laurie Levenson testified in support of the bill to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Van de Kamp chaired the California Commission of the Fair Administration of Justice, which produced a 2008 report that called the state’s death penalty system dysfunctional and a waste of money.

The Assembly Public Safety Committee will hold an informational hearing tomorrow on the state prison system’s “Secure Housing Units,” which were targeted by inmates’ recent hunger strike at Pelican Bay State Prison and other sites around California.

The hearing at the State Capitol, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., will be streamed live on the Assembly’s website.

After an introduction by chairman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francsico, the committee will hear from SHU inmates and their supporters: Earl Fears, a former Corcoran SHU inmate; Glenda Rojas, a family member of an inmate at Pelican Bay; and the Rev. William McGarvey from the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture.

After that come the legal and research experts: prisoner-rights lawyer Charles Carbone; American Friends Service Committee Regional Director Laura Magnani; Dorsey Nunn, executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and All of Us or None; Dr. Terry Kupers of the Wright Institute; and University of California, Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney.

Then the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will have its say for about half an hour, with testimony from Undersecretary of Operations Scott Kernan and Chief of Correctional Safety Anthony Chaus. There’ll be some time for public comment at the end.

UPDATE @ 1:51 P.M.: “This is an important opportunity for the California Legislature and the people of California to hold the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation accountable for upholding the basic needs and human rights of prisoners,” Carol Strickman, a lawyer at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, said in a news release. “The hunger strike opened the eyes of many people in California and around the world to the reprehensible conditions that exist within the SHU and now it’s time to start making some lasting changes.”

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Secretary Matthew Cate issued a statement this morning saying inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison had ended their hunger strike.

“Hunger strikes are a dangerous and ineffective way for prisoners to attempt to negotiate,” Cate said in his news release. “This strike was ordered by prison gang leaders, individuals responsible for terrible crimes against Californians, and so it was with significant and appropriate caution that CDCR worked to end the strike. We will now seek to stabilize operations for all inmates and continue our work to improve the safety and security of our prison system statewide.”

Cate said the strikers, who began their protest July 1, stopped yesterday “after they better understood CDCR’s plans, developed since January, to review and change some policies regarding SHU housing and gang management. These changes, to date, include providing cold-weather caps, wall calendars and some educational opportunities for SHU inmates.”

But this came as news to the prison activists who have been relating the strike to the outside world; lawyers and mediators haven’t heard from the hunger strikers that they’ve quit their protest.

“We would like to hear directly from the men at Pelican Bay that they have resumed eating and what demands, if any, have been met,” Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, said in a news release this afternoon. “At this point, we have not been able to ascertain what concessions may have been granted.”

CDCR “has used deceptive tactics throughout this strike to try to overcome prisoner resistance,” Taeva Shefler, a member of Prison Activist Resource Center and Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, said in the same release. “In order to break the strike, the CDCR has regularly underestimated strike participation and withheld information regarding the health of striking prisoners. Prisoners not yet in solitary have been placed in Administrative Segregation or Security Housing Units as punishment for protesting. These are the very issues this strike aims to change in the first place.”

The activists say hundreds of inmates refused food in order to protest conditions that international human rights groups have called torturous and inhumane. Inmates in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) – who have been classified as the prison system’s most dangerous and violent offenders – are kept in windowless, 6-foot-by-10-foot cells for about 23 and a half hours per day, sometimes for years. Their demands included an end to long-term solitary confinement, collective punishment, and forced interrogation on gang affiliation.

UPDATE @ 4:43 P.M.: The LA Times reports the inmates at Pelican Bay are eating again, but some inmates at Corcoran, Tehachapi and Calipatria – who’d started striking in sympathy with the Pelican Bay guys – are continuing to refuse meals.

Lousy internal control policies in California’s prison system puts millions of taxpayers’ dollars at risk of fraud and abuse, according to an audit released today by state Controller John Chiang.

“My auditors found the CDCR has grossly inadequate procedures in place for collecting overpayment of salaries and travel advances made through the agency’s office revolving fund,” Chiang said in a news release. “This is the latest in a series of agency audits conducted by my staff that point to the waste and abuse of state funds due to the lack of attention to collecting overpayments. Gov. Brown and I are working together to identify the causes of these problems and to protect public funds.”

The audit comes amid increasing inclination on both sides of the political aisle to find fiscal savings in the prison system, which accounts for 11.4 percent of the state’s general-fund spending in the current budget; in comparison, about 11.9 percent of general-fund spending goes to higher education.

Chang’s auditors reviewed California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records from July 1, 2009 through July, 31, 2010, and found that inadequate collection efforts resulted in delays in collecting millions of dollars in overpayments for employee salary and travel advances. Of more than $6 million in outstanding receivables related to salary and travel advances, more than $4 million, or 65.6 percent, remained outstanding for more than 60 days, and $465,000, or 7.5%, had been outstanding for more than three years.

For example, an employee terminated in May 2010 got a lump-sum check for $14,950 from the office’s revolving fund to meet the timeline for paying employees separating from state service, auditors found. But CDCR didn’t take the steps necessary to offset the employee’s final check, resulting in the former employee receiving both a salary advance and a full, final check. And six months later, there had been no effort to recoup the $14,950 overpayment.

In another case, an employee got a salary advance of more than $8,000 in January 2008, plus a regular payroll check; as of Nov. 1, 2010, almost three years later, the advance still hadn’t been collected, even though the employee still works for CDCR.

The audit also found serious internal control deficiencies put CDCR at risk for fraud and abuse. For example, CDCR was tardy or noncompliant in trying to “reconcile bank accounts to ensure the accuracy and completeness of recorded transactions,” the controller’s office said – what you and I would call balancing our checkbooks. As of June 30, 2010, the bank reconciliation of CDCR’s major account showed $27 million in unresolved funds on their bank balance, while CDCR’s records showed unresolved funds totaling more than $31 million on their book balance. Without reconciling these funds, anyone with access to the fund’s check stock could issue bogus checks with little chance of getting caught.

Also, state accounting procedures require two authorized signatures for payments of more than $15,000, yet the audit found two separate checks exceeding that amount without dual signatures.

And the audit found CDCR used its revolving fund to spend more than the department’s appropriation under the state budget. That those payments appeared to be for legitimate purposes isn’t the issue, the audit said: CDCR has no legal authority to make such payments without an appropriation from the Legislature. As of last Nov. 30, CDCR still hadn’t received reimbursement for more than $3.5 million in payments made from its revolving fund prior to June 30, 2010.

Martin Hoshino, CDCR Undersecretary for Administration and Offender Services, said the agency agrees with the findings and already has implemented 22 of the 36 recommendations made by Chiang’s office. In his formal response, Hoshino said CDCR has now “prioritized the vigorous collection of outstanding debts,” succeeding in decreasing the outstanding balance by $2.2 million since November 1, 2010. “We will continue in our efforts until we have surmounted the issues identified in this audit.”

Chiang’s auditors will revisit CDCR a year from now to gauge its progress in correcting the problems.

UPDATE @ 3:16 P.M.: “The situation here is terrible, but the great thing is that we have acknowledgement and action – it’s a new day in Sacramento,” Chiang told me this afternoon, noting Brown issued an executive order April 20 addressing some of the issues this audit found. “We think they’re making the efforts to do so. We’re going to go back a year from now and make sure they’re implementing as promised.”

Chiang said amid the state’s fiscal crisis, administrators must find every opportunity large and small to conserve money.

He blamed the sloppiness on “a lack of focus. What we’ve heard in prior instances is that it (proper bookkeeping) is not their core function, but they have to understand they’re not going to be able to perform those core functions unless they have financial controls.”

An author of California’s death-penalty law as it exists today will testify for its abolition tomorrow, an East Bay lawmaker announced.

Don Heller, a former prosecutor who authored the successful Proposition 7 of 1978 to broaden the capital punishment California had just reinstated the previous year, will testify to the Assembly Public Safety Committee in favor of SB 490, state Sen. Loni Hancock’s bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. The bill would convert the sentences of all those now on California’s death row to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Witnesses previously scheduled to testify for the bill include Hancock, D-Berkeley, who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee as well as the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Corrections; Judy Kerr, sister of a murder victim and spokeswoman for California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty; and Death Penalty Focus Executive Director Jeanne Woodford, who as San Quentin State Prison’s warden oversaw four executions before becoming director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Among those scheduled to testify against the bill are Crime Victims United of California lobbyist Dawn Sanders-Koepke and a representative from the California District Attorneys Association.