On the face of it, Grass Valley is another postcard pretty Gold Rush town high in the Sierras. Lola Montez once danced for miners here, and an influx of hippie inhabitants in recent decades has lent aptness to its name. But the tiny community has a crisis on its hands. In January, Scott Harlan Thorpe, an unemployed 40-year-old diagnosed as depressive, shot five people in a local diner. Thorpe had just gone to see his doctor, who had bolted his office door against him in fear.
Frustrated, Thorpe shot at mental health workers at the County Behavioral Service - one jumped out of a second storey window, breaking legs and pelvis - before driving to Lyons Fast Food. There, he accused staff of poisoning his fries, and started firing again. Three people died and three were injured in all, including the woman who jumped out of the window.
My aunt and uncle were among a crowd locked out of the nearby Flour Garden Cafe by panic-stricken staff. Then they were locked inside until Thorpe turned himself in.
"Everyone says he seemed ordinary enough in his old red pick-up," tut-tutted my aunt. "Just look at that sweet, sad face. It shows how the mental health services have gone downhill. Scott had his monthly visit to the county health service, but the doctor was barricading his door! A man like that shouldn't be at liberty, let alone have a gun."
"He's gotten real paranoid of late," said Thorpe's mother, who had been visiting. "He's just not done too well recently."
Neighbours think Scott became "paranoid" from smoking marijuana for a back injury. He'd bought his semi-automatic pistol before strict gun checks came in.
"It's just out of the norm for our little town, but seems like it's happening more and more," said car mechanic Jeff Bradley, who had heard the shots from underneath a hood. But despite Thorpe's obvious insanity, local district attorney Mike Ferguson said he would "strongly, strongly consider" the death penalty. Currently, Thorpe's mental competence is being evaluated. He probably will not face a capital charge.
In contrast to Thorpe's case is that of Robert Lee Massie, condemned to death for the 1979 murder of a San Francisco liquor store owner, and ensnared in a "tug-of-death tussle" between San Francisco's liberal district attorney Terence Hallinan and state attorney Gen Bill Lockyer. Hallinan refused to ask for an execution date for Massie, possibly the only time this has ever happened. He was overruled by Lockyer, and Massie is scheduled for a lethal injection at one minute past midnight on Tuesday morning.
Hallinan is the son of trial lawyer Vincent Hallinan, the legendary "lion in court", who himself served time in San Quentin for contempt in one of the century's most famous cases, that of strike organiser Harry Bridges.
Like the equally heroic sheriff of San Francisco, Mike Hennessey (the only US sheriff to give prisoners condoms), the younger Hallinan is opposed to the death penalty. Hennessey and Hallinan are the only sheriff and district attorney to oppose the death penalty in California, and probably the only ones in all America. This literally unprecedented event is complicated by the fact that Massie is actively petitioning for his own execution. Yet Hallinan vows to stop the killing by any means possible, echoing the stand of former chief justice Rose Bird in the 1970s.
The embattled D.A. is also running for mayor. In the US, a candidate running for office is often to be found signing death warrants left and right like the corrupt city boss in the Howard Hawks's classic, His Girl Friday. This time, the candidate is trying to prevent a self-confessed killer from paying the price - and the result could well be that he himself pays a price.
Another Irishman tackled the death penalty in California before Hallinan and Hennessey, even before Justice Bird. Former governor Edmund (Pat) Brown - father of Oakland's mayor, Jerry Brown, and the man who finally sent Caryl Chessman to "the little green room" - wrote very personally in his Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor's Education On Death Row about 36 executions that took place during his term.
Brown became an adamant opponent of the death penalty, and concluded that some convicted men needed to be saved from themselves. He was replaced in Sacramento by yet another Irish-American, Ronald Reagan, under whom "cop killer" Aaron Mitchell went to the gas chamber.
But in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that California's means of execution was "cruel and unusual punishment" and made it unconstitutional. Death Row ceased to exist. Confessed and convicted murderers like Sharon Tate's killer, Charles Manson, and Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Bobby Kennedy, were moved to other jails, their sentences commuted.
It was also Reagan who, as governor, dismantled the state mental health institutions, releasing thousands of the institutionalised onto the streets. Arguably, this single act raised crime rates and is Reagan's most enduring legacy. People like Scott Harlan Thorpe were sent home from hospitals or never placed in the kind of institution open to them prior to the Reagan years.
But, in 1976, the Supreme Court changed direction again. By 1978, death row was back in business, and by 1988, 224 prisoners awaited the gas chamber, despite Justice Bird's stubborn efforts to overturn sentences, ending her own career. Executions resumed in 1992, with Robert Alton Harris (see panel, right). Six more followed, one of which is now thought to be a serious miscarriage of justice, that of "Tommy" Thompson, whose accomplice confessed to the crime after the execution.
The Thorpe and Massie cases are important because of Bush-nominated attorney-general John Ashcroft's unwavering belief in the right to bear firearms and his oft-stated firmness on executions.
Ashcroft is so inflexible on the death penalty that his Capitol Hill hearing led to the removal of Judge Ronnie White, the conservative black judge in Missouri who was targeted as "soft on the death penalty" by Ashcroft when Clinton picked White for a seat. When White lost his appointment, Ashcroft was accused of racism, but protested that his only concern was the judge's opposition to the death penalty.
Ashcroft's views, however, are no longer shared by all of America. The former Missouri senator's hearing comes at a time when Californians have dropped their support for capital punishment by a significant 22 points, from 80 per cent to 58 per cent. A new high of 73 per cent now favours a moratorium.
Across the US, four more states are moving towards a moratorium. There has also been a general drop in executions across the US, except in Oklahoma and President Bush's own state of Texas. In 2000, then-governor Bush signed more execution orders than any year since 1930, when federal records began, according to US Department of Justice statistics.
Texas led the list again with 40 last year, followed by 14 in Virginia, nine in Missouri, seven in Arizona and six in Oklahoma (where bomber Timothy McVeigh has a date set in May). All of these are traditional pro-penalty states, along with Florida, Missouri and Louisiana of Dead Man Walking fame.
Thanks to several high-profile cases in Illinois, where several inmates were exonerated because DNA and other evidence revealed police, legal or judicial errors, public death penalty support has now dropped to 66 per cent across America.
There are no hard and fast statistics, but Yale Law School estimates the number of wrongfully convicted and executed prisoners at as high as a quarter of all cases.
Three wrongful cases were enough to make Illinois governor George Ryan suspend the death penalty in that state, after a journalism class in Northwestern University investigated the three as part of a class project. Using simple legwork, students produced enough new evidence to spring three innocent men from death row.
Last year, they won convicted lifer Anthony Porter his freedom. He had come within two days of the death chamber, after serving 16 years on death row. Yet the class did little more than read the evidence and chase down witnesses. By reenacting the crime in the park where Porter had been accused of firing, they discovered such action was physically impossible from that spot. The Porter case launched an expose of wrongful convictions and changed Governor Ryan's mind.
Of the estimated 3,726 prisoners currently on death row, 43 per cent are African-American, although Latinos are catching up fast. Close to 90 per cent of those executed have been accused of killing a white person.
Ninety-eight prisoners were executed in 2000, all but four by lethal injection, one in a gas chamber and three by electric chair. Almost all were men.