California will close San Quentin’s death row and turn it into a ‘positive and healing environment’

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San Quentin death row – where California‘s most macabre and twisted killers were once caged – is being shuttered and converted into a ‘positive, healing environment.’

The prison ward is seeped in dark history dating back to March 3, 1893 when the first of 215 prisoners was dropped to his death from a noose. It has since housed crazed, bloodthirsty serial killers including Charles Manson and William Bonin, who murdered at least 21 young men and boys.

It’s the place where Richard ‘the night stalker’ Ramirez was marched through in shackles after he was convicted of raping, torturing, and murdering at least 13 people in an unspeakable rein of terror that paralyzed Southern California with fear.

Those who’ve toured the building have described it as eerily quite at times – so much so that it appeared devoid of prisoners, despite cells being filled with convicts who’ve committed unspeakable crimes.

The LA Times described the granite unit as ‘straight out of 1930, the year it was built. 

‘The cavern is filled with sound: metal echoing off stone, the drone of large air circulation systems, and random shouts drifting down from above.’ 

Now, Governor Gavin Newsom is moving to dismantle San Quentin’s death row and transfer 670 condemned inmates – including wife killer Scott Peterson – into the general prison population. Newsom placed a moratorium on executions in 2019. 

‘We are starting the process of closing death row to repurpose and transform the current housing units into something innovative and anchored in rehabilitation,’ corrections department spokeswoman Vicky Waters told The Associated Press.

Death row has recorded countless natural deaths, drug overdoses, fatal prison riots and suicides among inmates awaiting execution in recent decades.

Ramirez – who once said he bided time behind bars watching televised sportscasts of female athletes – died of natural causes in 2013 while awaiting execution. He was 53.

In his final interview, Ramirez spoke of his admiration for Ted Levine’s performance as a psychopathic murderer who kidnaps and skins women in the 1991 thriller Silence of the Lambs.

Ramirez was moved into death row after being was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders in 1984 and 1985. He also was convicted of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

California, one of 28 states that maintain death rows, carried out its last execution in 2006 when ending the life of a frail, 76-year-old killer who by then had lost his vision and was confined to a wheelchair. 

Before he was given a fatal injection, Clarence Ray Allen was gently scooted onto a gurney inside the cramped death chamber.

Allen breathed heavily as a team of guards restrained his arms and legs to the table and set about methodically preparing him for a lethal combination of drugs.

He turned his head to witnesses he had requested attend his execution and appeared to say ‘I love you.’

Allen was executed for ordering the deaths of three people in 1980 while serving a life sentence for murder in the state’s Folsom Prison. 

Lethal injection was among three methods of execution used at San Quentin’s death row throughout its 129-year history.

California hanged its last condemned prisoner in 1936 before turning to legal gas as its sole method of execution. However, since 1996, executions have only been carried out by lethal injection.

Throughout the decades, America’s most nefarious and cold-blooded killers have done time on San Quentin’s death row, among then stagecoach robber Black Bart, serial killer Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, who was sent to San Quentin’s death row for assassinating Robert F. Kennedy. (Sirhan’s sentenced was commuted to life when California previously abolished the death penalty in 1972.) 

Scott Peterson, 49, was caged in death row until recently for killing his pregnant wife on Christmas Eve 2002. He killed Laci, 27, and dumped her in the San Francisco Bay, where her body was discovered in April 2003. Baby Conner’s fetus, which was also recovered, was mutilated.

He was transferred to San Mateo County jail last November after his death sentence was overturned.

Richard Allen Davis, 67, has been on death row at the prison since his 1996 conviction in the kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, California. The case helped gain support for California’s ‘three-strikes law’ for repeat offenders.

Other chilling characters who once resided at San Quentin’s death row include serial killer Lonnie Franklin. 

Nicknamed the ‘Grim Sleeper,’ Franklin was convicted in 2016 for the killings of nine women and a teenage girl in Los Angeles dating to the 1980s. He was linked at trial to 14 slayings, including four women he wasn’t charged with killing.

Charles Ng – who with an accomplice – raped and killed at least 11 women at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the mid-1980s. He’s currently on death row although his crime partner, Leonard Lake, committed suicide in 1985. 

Also taking up residence on California’s only death row was Rodney James Alcala, who stalked women like prey and took earrings as trophies from some of his victims, prosecutors said 

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five slayings in California between 1977 and 1979. In 2013, he received an additional 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York. 

Investigators say his true victim count may never be known. He was moved to a prison in Corcoran, California for medical reasons shortly before his death last July.

Although some of those on San Quentin’s death row were career criminals with troubled histories, others were family men who seemingly snapped. 

Vincent Brothers is a former high school principal who killed his wife, newborn baby, two toddlers, and mother-in-law in July 2003. 

Prosecutors said he tried to create an alibi by flying to Columbus, Ohio, with the pretext of visiting his brother. He then drove his rental car to Bakersfield, California, to kill his family and returned to Ohio. Now 59, he’s been on San Quentin’s death row since 2007. 

Newsom, a Democrat, shut down the state´s execution chamber at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, after issuing the execution moratorium. 

Now his administration is turning on its head a 2016 voter-approved initiative intended to expedite executions by capitalizing on one provision that allowed inmates to be moved off death row.

‘The underlying motive of the administration is to mainstream as many of these condemned murderers as possible,’ said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which backed the initiative. ‘Our objective was to speed up the process.’

He added he doesn’t think victims are happy with the administration’s decision.

‘They´re moving condemned murderers into facilities that are going to make their lives better and offer them more amenities, while the victims still mourn the death of their family member,’ Rushford said.

Newsom said voters approved the move, though he doubts many understood the provision.

‘When they affirmed the death penalty, they also affirmed a responsibility… to actually move that population on death row out and to get them working,’ Newsom said.

Corrections officials began a voluntary two-year pilot program in January 2020 that as of Friday had moved 116 of the state´s 673 condemned male inmates to one of seven other prisons that have maximum security facilities and are surrounded by lethal electrified fences.

They intend to submit permanent proposed regulations within weeks that would make the transfers mandatory and ‘allow for the repurposing of all death row housing units,’ Waters said.

The ballot measure approved six years ago also required condemned inmates to participate in prison jobs, with 70 per cent of the money going for restitution to their victims, and corrections officials said that´s their goal with the transfers. By the end of last year, more than $49,000 in restitution had been collected under the pilot program.

Newsom´s proposed budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 seeks $1.5 million to find new uses for the vacant condemned housing.

It notes that death row and its supporting activities are in the same area as facilities used for rehabilitation programs for medium-security San Quentin inmates. The money would be used to hire a consultant to ‘develop options for (the) space focused on creating a positive, healing environment to provide increased rehabilitative, educational and health care opportunities.’

San Quentin´s never-used $853,000 execution chamber is in a separate area of the prison, and there are no plans to ‘repurpose’ that area, Waters said.

California voters supported the death penalty in 2012 and 2016, though legislative opponents have said they hope to put the issue before voters again in coming years. An advisory panel to Newsom and lawmakers, the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, in November became the latest to recommend repealing the death penalty, calling it ‘beyond repair.’

Under the state´s transfer program, condemned inmates moved to other prisons can be housed in solitary or disciplinary confinement if officials decide they cannot be safely housed with others, although they are supposed to be interspersed with other inmates. Inmates on death row are housed one to a cell, but the transferred inmates can be housed with others if it´s deemed safe.

‘There have been no safety concerns, and no major disciplinary issues have occurred,’ Waters said.

When it comes to jobs and other rehabilitation activities, condemned inmates outside death row are treated similarly to inmates serving sentences of life without parole. That includes a variety of jobs such as maintenance and administrative duties, according to prison officials.

The condemned inmates are counted more often and are constantly supervised during activities, officials said.

Under current rules, condemned inmates can be transferred unless they are in restricted housing for disciplinary reasons, have pending charges, or have been found guilty of certain disciplinary offenses in the past five years.

But they also are ‘carefully screened to determine whether they can safely participate in the program,’ according to the department. That includes things like each inmate´s security level, medical, psychiatric and other needs, their behavior, safety concerns and notoriety.

Female condemned inmates are housed at the Central California Women´s Facility in Chowchilla. They can transfer to less restrictive housing within the same prison, and eight of the 21 have done so.

The men can be moved to California Correctional Institution; California Medical Facility; California State Prison, Corcoran; Centinela State Prison; Kern Valley State Prison; Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility; or Salinas Valley State Prison.

Since its gas chamber was installed in 1938, 194 people -including four women – were killed through 1967. 

Gangster Juanita Spinelli was the first woman to be gassed for slaying a fellow gang member to prevent him from snitching. She was 53 at the time of her November 22, 1941 death.

In 1947, Louise L. Peete became the second woman to be executed in California. 

She initially served a life sentence for killing her boss and cashing his forged checks worth $750 in 1920, but was granted parole decades later, only to kill again.

She was sentenced to death in 1945 after murdering another boss, Margaret Logan, and burying the victim’s body in a backyard. 

Emma LeDoux – dubbed the ‘Trunk Murderess’ was the first woman to be sentenced to death in 1906 for poisoning her husband and stuffing his body in a trunk. 

‘She tried to have the trunk shipped to her home in Amador County but the trunk wasn’t properly registered so it sat on the platform,’ says a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation historical report.

‘Train station personnel noticed the smell and became suspicious.’ 

LeDoux’s death sentence was downgraded to life behind bars and she was paroled from San Quentin after just 10 years, only to be nabbed again for ‘running a bogus marriage scheme.’