Albert Greenwood Brown

Albert Greenwood Brown, convicted in 1980 of the abduction, rape and murder of a 15th year old girl in Riverside, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday, September 29. His lawyers have asked Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Northern District Court to delay the execution in order to examine whether his 2006 order to upgrade lethal injection procedures has been respected. Executions have been barred since 2006 and this will be the first one since Judge Fogel’s order. These are the new regulations as they appear on the CDCR website.

More details about Brown, the case, his subsequent appeals, and the execution ban due to the order can be found on the CNN news blog; and here is the 9th Circuit decision rejecting Brown’s arguments regarding ineffective assistance of counsel and 8th Amendment arguments regarding lethal injection. For readers unfamiliar with ineffective assistance claims, the appellant or habeas petitioner needs to prove the two-prong “Strickland standard”: first, that the attorney’s services fell beneath the minimum expected from a professional (the “performance prong”), and also that, had the attorney done his or her job properly, the outcome of the trial would have been different (the “prejudice prong”).