A group of death penalty opponents walk to the front gate of San Quentin Prison in San Quentin, Calif., Monday, Feb. 20, 2006, before the scheduled execution of Michael Morales on Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the execution of the convicted killer, ending his legal battle to avoid the execution. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

San Quentin State Prison's warden quickly rescheduled the execution for 7:30 tonight by eliminating the anesthesiologists' role and ordering that Morales be put to death with one drug, the powerful barbiturate sodium pentothal, instead of the three that the state has used since 1996. A federal judge had given the state that option but officials had previously rejected it, because it would take an estimated 30 to 45 minutes to kill the inmate instead of the usual eight to 10 minutes.

If Morales is not executed before midnight, when his death warrant expires, a new execution date would be more than a month away.

Morales, 46, of Stockton, was convicted of raping and murdering 17-year-old Terri Winchell, whose battered body was found in a vineyard in a remote area of San Joaquin County in January 1981. Morales never denied his guilt and said he had been recruited for the attack by his cousin. The cousin is serving a life sentence.

The delay in his execution angered Brian Chalk, Winchell's youngest brother, who had come to San Quentin to watch Morales' scheduled 12:01 a.m. execution.

"Everybody's upset,'' said Chalk, 34, who plans to return tonight with two of his three brothers. "I guess they're just going to have to pump him full of poison one way or the other.''

Morales' lead attorney, David Senior, was also angry, but on behalf of his client. Senior, exiled in a room at the prison for hours to await word of an execution that never came, said the prison officials and judges who cobbled together a new set of rules for the execution didn't realize how much pain they had caused.

"I find their behavior to be reprehensible,'' he said. "It astounds me that people are still willing to put up with it.''

The postponement stemmed from confusion over the roles of two anesthesiologists whose presence as safeguards against a botched execution was ordered last week by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel.

Fogel said the state had to take steps to make sure Morales was unconscious when injected with paralyzing and heart-stopping chemicals, the final two drugs of the three-drug sequence that California has been using for executions.

The judge gave state officials two options: place a medical professional in the execution chamber to determine that the prisoner was rendered unconscious by the initial dose of sodium pentothal and did not regain consciousness, or eliminate the second and third drugs and use only sodium pentothal. The state says that drug is lethal in the five-gram dose allotted for the execution.

The state retained two private anesthesiologists, whose identities were not made public, and proceeded with plans for the execution early this morning. But shortly before 11:30 p.m., warden Steven Ornoski announced a one-hour delay, saying prison staff and the anesthesiologists needed more time to work out their assigned roles.

Morales' lawyers then hurried to court seeking to block the execution, saying the prison procedures failed to guarantee that the anesthesiologists could intervene if something went wrong. Fogel and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied stays of execution within an hour, but by then the anesthesiologists had determined that their roles were unacceptable.

The apparent sticking point was the physicians' obligation, under procedures specified by a federal appeals court in a ruling Sunday, to intervene if Morales appeared to regain consciousness or displayed signs of pain. The court said the anesthesiologists would then have to take steps to render the inmate unconscious or "otherwise alleviate the painful effects'' of the drugs.

"Any such intervention would clearly be medically unethical,'' the doctors said in a written statement today. "As a result, we have withdrawn from participation in this current process.''

Morales appeared to have exhausted his last legal appeals Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take his case. He spent the day largely by himself, seeing only members of his legal team. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation described him as "very cooperative and upbeat."

Morales had no visits from family or friends Monday but said goodbye to them by telephone after being taken to a death-watch cell near the lethal injection chamber at 6 p.m., Crittendon said. He said Morales had discouraged relatives from coming to see him.

"He wanted to make clear to his loved ones that this is not necessarily a sad affair,'' Crittendon said. "He wanted to be remembered for the good times they had in the past, as opposed to the event that is happening tonight.''

Morales, whose lawyers said he had become devoutly religious in prison, did not request the presence of a spiritual adviser, Jennings said.

The Supreme Court's rejection came Monday afternoon. In one appeal, Morales' lawyers argued that his conviction for capital murder was the product of a jailhouse informant's false testimony that Morales had admitted planning the killing. The federal appeals court dismissed that appeal Sunday, saying the informant's testimony was corroborated by other witnesses.

The second appeal challenged the adequacy of Fogel's order last week that required the state to put a medical professional in the death chamber. The appeals court said Sunday that the two anesthesiologists whom the state retained had all the authority they needed to stop the execution if Morales was conscious and in pain.

After the Supreme Court rejection, Morales' lawyers made a final plea to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to reconsider his denial of clemency. Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who is on Morales' legal team, noted that the judge who sentenced Morales to death in 1983 had recently endorsed clemency. Starr said this would be the first time in California history that a governor had spurned such a recommendation by the trial judge.

Three hours later, Schwarzenegger replied that he saw no reason to reconsider.

About 250 death penalty opponents gathered outside the prison. They included retired Episcopal priest Lyle Grosjean of San Francisco, who had led a group of about 15 people on foot across the Golden Gate Bridge.

"We're against any gratuitous violence,'' said Grosjean, who has protested executions at San Quentin since 1959. "The death penalty doesn't have to happen.''

Ruth Enero of Modesto, who accompanied Grosjean, said it was her 12th execution-eve walk. "I know that executing Michael Morales does not do anything to resurrect Terri Winchell,'' she said.

Morales was 21 when he murdered Winchell on Jan. 8, 1981. He was a gangster and drug user with a record of petty crimes, had been kicked out of his parents' home at 15, and had dropped out of high school and fathered three children.

According to trial testimony, his cousin Ricky Ortega recruited him to attack Winchell, a popular high school senior with a straight-A average who was an accomplished singer. Winchell's boyfriend was secretly in a relationship with Ortega, who was gay.

Morales' lawyers say the plan was not to kill Winchell but to frighten her out of any thought of revealing Ortega's sexuality by briefly choking her. But when he accompanied Ortega in a car to pick up Winchell, Morales, high on PCP and cheap wine, carried not just a belt but also a claw hammer and a 7-inch knife.

In an isolated area north of Lodi, Morales, sitting in the back seat, reached forward with his belt and started strangling Winchell, prosecution witnesses said he told them. When the belt broke, he started hitting her in the head with the hammer.

After 23 blows, he carried her, unconscious and dying, out of the car, dragged her to a vineyard, raped her and stabbed her four times.

Police tracked down Ortega the next day. He pointed them to Morales, who confessed to investigators.

Morales was convicted in 1983 of two counts of capital murder: murder by torture, which was overturned on appeal, and murder by lying in wait.

One prosecution witness was Morales' housemate, Patricia Flores, who said Morales had practiced with his belt around her neck and had later described the killing. An inmate who did time in jail with Morales, Bruce Samuelson, testified that Morales had bragged about the murder, referred to Winchell with sexual vulgarities, and asked him to kill Flores and another witness.

Ortega, tried separately, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

As his appeal wound through the courts, Morales became a changed man in prison, according to friends and relatives. He resumed academic studies, became religious and took up art, producing portraits and landscapes sold in the prison store.

"I've done my best over the years to strip off the old personality with all its flaws and shameful practices, and put on a new personality. One shaped by good morals and strong values,'' Morales said last month in a letter to Schwarzenegger, part of his application for clemency.

Morales' lawyers also cited Samuelson's statement 10 years after the trial that he and Morales had discussed the crime in Spanish -- proof that the jailhouse informant's testimony was a lie, they said, because Morales speaks no Spanish.

That persuaded Morales' trial judge, Charles McGrath, to join the appeal for clemency, saying he would have set aside the jury's death verdict if he had known of the informant's falsehoods.

But claims that the death sentence was based on perjured testimony failed to sway federal courts, which found no evidence that authorities had deliberately planted Samuelson next to Morales or knowingly presented lies to the jury.

Morales would be the third prisoner put to death in a little more than two months in California and the 14th since executions resumed in 1992 after a 25-year hiatus.

Dane Gillette, death penalty coordinator for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, said the recent cluster of executions did not signal a speedup in the implementation of California's death penalty. Instead, he said, it merely reflected the fact that a few cases more than 20 years old cleared the federal courts around the same time.

There are 644 other inmates on the state's Death Row, the nation's largest. Only one other inmate's case has advanced far enough for a possible execution date later this year, Gillette said -- Mitchell Sims, convicted of murdering a Domino's Pizza deliveryman in Glendale (Los Angeles County) in 1986.

Sims used to work for Domino's in South Carolina, and was also sentenced to death in that state for killing two company employees before he came to California.

Chronicle staff writers Kevin Fagan and John Wildermuth contributed to this report.

©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

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