A look at the hard life inside San Quentin’s Death Row

[...] for the more than 700 of the most notorious killers warehoused alone in cells in San Quentin State Prison, death likely won’t come at the end of a needle in the facility’s lethal-injection chamber.

For the first time since the death penalty was put on pause in the state, reporters on Tuesday got an in-depth look at the cold concrete corridors, locked cells and shackled inmates on California’s ever-growing Death Row.

Clark, an aging man with long, gray hair and an eye patch, looked little like his much-younger self — a serial murderer dubbed one of the “Sunset Strip killers” for a series of particularly grisly slayings in Los Angeles in 1980.

Prisoners sent to the 102-cell hole are isolated because of their bad — usually violent — behavior in the main cell block, and are given limited time to exercise in outdoor metal cages.

In the yard Tuesday afternoon, inmates worked out in 8-by-10-foot, chain-link corrals while armed guards kept a watchful eye from above.

In recent weeks, supporters of two competing ballot initiatives — one seeks to scrap executions, while the other is trying to fast-track them — were cleared to gather signatures in hopes of changing the state’s laws.

Galvan and others on Death Row are considerably more likely to die at their own hand, from natural causes, a drug overdose, or by getting killed by a fellow inmate or prison guard, than by execution.

[...] that’s the way it goes on Death Row.

Since 1978, when the Legislature re-enacted the death penalty, only 13 inmates have been executed, while more than 100 have perished from other means inside the prison walls.

The now-feeble convicted child killer hid inside his dark cell while reporters walked by — a stark change in behavior from his antagonistic courtroom theatrics that played out during his 1996 sentencing.

Other inmates began to chime in, sharing Burton’s frustrations about the conditions inside the dark, desolate main housing facility for condemned inmates.

[...] San Quentin’s warden, Ron Davis, has highlighted the strides his prison has made in inmate conditions, including a new state-of-the-art mental health facility designed to treat condemned prisoners with serious mental illnesses.

In 1938, lethal gas became the official method of capital punishment.

In February 1972, the California Supreme Court found the death penalty to violate constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and blocked all executions.

On Feb. 23, 1996, serial killer William George Bonin became the first California inmate to die by lethal injection.

Poorly trained staff, with unclear instructions and little oversight in the dimly lit former gas chamber, risked leaving dying inmates conscious and writhing in pain, violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, Fogel said.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reviewed its protocols on lethal injections and built a new, roomy death chamber at the prison in 2008 with brightly lit viewing rooms.