Sara Catania

San Quentin does not coddle inmates, especially those facing execution. For the condemned, every prison rule — from the complete segregation of condemned inmates to a ban on their handling money or holding even the lowliest prison job — reinforces the message that their sole function is to wait for......

SAN RAFAEL - In late March and early April, a trio of staff experts gathered in a San Quentin meeting room, notebooks in hand, pencils at the ready. Facing them, shackled hand and foot, his expression vacant and bemused as ever, was condemned inmate Horace Edwards Kelly. Each of the......

When the leaders of the Sierra Club summoned the media to their San Francisco headquarters last weekend to trumpet the failure of an anti-immigration insurgency, they timed the gathering for maximum effect. A Saturday announcement, they knew, would be splashed across the front pages of the Sunday papers, spreading the......

SAN RAFAEL - Each weekday morning since early April, Horace Edwards Kelly has been roused from his bunk on San Quentin's Death Row to be showered and then shackled for the short drive to the Marin County Courthouse. He takes his seat in courtroom F, quietly smiling or staring off......

SAN RAFAEL — In firm, measured tones, the attorney for convicted murderer Horace Edwards Kelly told a Marin County jury this week that his client has a "broken brain" that has left him cut off from reality and therefore unable to be legally executed. The trial to determine whether Kelly......

On a brilliant spring day in 1996, flanked by American flags on the White House South Lawn, President Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. "From now on," he told the gathered citizenry as a military band stood by, "criminals sentenced to death for their vicious crimes will......

With the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Horace Edwards Kelly less than a week away, his attorneys are arguing in a Marin County courtroom that their client is not sane enough to be put to death. In California’s first pre-execution sanity trial in decades, attorneys pleaded for the life of......

"No nation in human history ever undertook to deal with such masses of alien population," declared the Atlantic Monthly, blaming immigration for the debased standard of living of many Americans, and warning that further admittance of the "vast hordes" could destroy the soil, the land, the very air Americans breathe......