CALIFORNIANS debate deathpenalty status.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California has long been what one expert calls a “symbolic death-penalty state,” one of 12 that has capital punishment on the books but has not executed anyone in more than a decade.

Prodded by voters and lawsuits, the nation’s most populous state may now be easing back toward allowing executions, though observers are split on how quickly they will resume, if at all.

Corrections officials expect to meet a Wednesday deadline to submit revised lethal-injection rules to state regulators, trying again with technical changes after the first attempt was rejected in December.

The California Supreme Court, meanwhile, is expected to rule by August on challenges to a ballot initiative narrowly approved by voters in November that would speed up executions by reducing the time allowed for appeals.

California has by far the nation’s largest death row with nearly 750 inmates, about double that of No. 2 Florida.

The state’s proposed lethal-injection regulations are patterned after a single-drug process that already passed muster with the U.S. Supreme Court, said law professor Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

Corrections officials submitted the regulations only after they were forced to act by a judge’s ruling on behalf of crime victims angered at the state’s three-year delay. But the regulations replacing California’s old three-drug method are likely to be approved at some point, Weisberg said.

Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and an expert on lethal injections, was among those who said recent revisions to the state’s proposed regulations still don’t cure underlying problems that can lead to botched executions.

For instance, the proposed rules now give executioners 10 minutes to administer each round of lethal drugs. The first batch is supposed to kill, but if that initial dose doesn’t work, executioners would administer four more similar doses, each with a 10-minute countdown clock to make sure the process doesn’t drag on for hours as critics said was a possibility under the original rules.

If the inmate is still alive after five doses, “the San Quentin Warden shall stop the execution and summon medical assistance for the inmate.”

The regulations still call for letting the warden at San Quentin State Prison pick from among four powerful barbiturates — amobarbital, pentobarbital, secobarbital or thiopental — depending on which one is available as manufacturers try to limit the use of their drugs for executions.

Denno said California’s regulations would still conceal the identities, training and experience of the execution team, crucial information since the deadly drugs must be properly measured, mixed and administered to ensure a painless death.

“It’s a complicated process, and everything has to be going right, and it’s so easy in a prison context for everything not to go right,” she said. She equated it to letting amateurs provide anesthesia for surgery.

Denno and other experts said the new rules eventually will have to pass the scrutiny of U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who halted executions in the state in early 2006 and ordered prison officials to improve their letha-injection process.

“In California, it’s become a symbolic death penalty state,” Denno said. “Whether that is going to change or not is unpredictable.”