Now more than seven years since the last execution in California, the state this week will try again to revive its dormant death penalty system in an appeals court considering the latest legal tangle over San Quentin’s lethal injection procedures.

In a hearing Tuesday, the 1st District Court of Appeal will review a Marin County judge’s 2011 order stopping executions because prison officials failed to comply with administrative rules in revising California’s three-drug execution method. The Brown administration appealed the ruling, likely assuring the state will not execute anyone this year on its 734-inmate death row.

Even as the appeal proceeds, prison officials continue to craft a new execution procedure that would rely on a single drug to put condemned killers to death, similar to methods other states such as Arizona, Washington and Ohio set up to short-circuit challenges to the three-drug procedures. A prison spokeswoman said last week there is no timetable for adopting a single-drug method.

But California appears a long way from resolving a morass of state and federal legal battles over lethal injection.

Switching to the single-drug approach would likely require a new round of administrative hearings, which could take a year or more. Resolution of the legal battle in the 1st District would only pave the way for a return to the federal courts, which first put executions on hold in 2006. And states across the country, including California, are facing fresh problems over a shortage of drugs used in executions, and questions over whether they’ve obtained them legally from overseas manufacturers.

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