Morales asks State Court to stay execution

By Julia Cheever, Bay City News Service

February 21, 2006, 6:30 p.m.

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - Lawyers for a murderer scheduled to be put to death tonight asked the California Supreme Court this afternoon to halt the execution on the ground that the state's plan to use a second procedure is unconstitutional double jeopardy.

Michael Morales, 46, was originally scheduled to be executed by a three-drug lethal injection procedure at San Quentin State Prison shortly after midnight this morning, but corrections officials postponed the execution after two anesthesiologists declined to participate because of ethical concerns.

The execution was then rescheduled for 7:30 p.m. tonight. Corrections officials won permission from a federal judge in San Jose this afternoon to proceed using only one drug, the barbiturate sodium pentothal.

But Morales' lawyers claim in a habeas corpus petition filed with the state high court in San Francisco that the second execution attempt would be a "psychologically torturous, inhuman and barbaric plan in violation of Mr. Morales' federal and state constitutional rights to due process and protection against being placed twice in jeopardy."

The petition asks for an immediate stay of execution and a future evidentiary hearing on Morales' challenge to the execution procedure.

The petition alleges, "Mr. Morales has been subjected to the harrowing experience of being told he would be killed at a certain hour, prepared in excruciating detail for his death, left in unexplained and excruciating suspense for three hours past the time he was informed the execution ritual would begin and then ultimately told the state intended to repeat the ordeal beginning at 7:30 tonight."

The defense attorneys argue in the petition that scheduling the new procedure within 17 hours of the attempt to use the original procedure amounts to "unconstitutionally impermissible punishment twice for the same offense."

Morales, of Stockton, was sentenced to death for murdering 17 year-old Terri Winchell of Lodi in 1981 by attempting to strangle her, beating and stabbing her. He was also convicted of raping her.

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