In a tentative ruling Thursday, Marin County Superior Court Judge Faye D’Opal found prison officials failed to properly consider a one-drug alternative to the three-drug lethal injection cocktail used to execute inmates.

Attorneys representing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will get a chance to change the judge’s mind during a hearing Friday morning.

CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton said Thursday the department was reviewing the lengthy ruling and declined to comment.

If the judge upholds his ruling, it would throw California’s stalled capital punishment system into further doubt.

Prison officials would either have to appeal or again revise their lethal injection procedures and submit them to public comment, a process that took more than a year last time.

It also could become the second court ruling barring executions in California. A federal judge imposed a de facto moratorium on executions in 2006 after finding the lethal injection process flawed in the state.

One of the state’s responses to that finding was to adopt the new regulations, which D’Opal’ s tentative ruling said was severely deficient.

D’Opal said that prison officials failed to properly explain why they rejected a one-drug process using only a barbiturate, even though one of their experts recommended it as being superior to the three-drug cocktail CDCR adopted. The judge wrote that critics of the three-drug lethal injection submitted comments to the CDCR saying that one of those three drugs — pancuronium bromide — “is unnecessary, dangerous, and creates a risk of excruciating pain.”

D’Opal said that the CDCR also failed to disclose the costs of executions, all of which are conducted at San Quentin Prison in Marin County.

The judge noted that former San Quentin Prison Warden Jeanne Woodford said each execution costs the state between $70,000 and $200,000 in overtime for staff, crowd control, training, security and other expenses with carrying out lethal injections.

D’Opal also took exception to three new procedures introduced without explanations in the new protocols.

“Why it is necessary for unit staff to monitor the inmate and to complete documentation every fifteen minutes starting five days before execution?” the judge asked rhetorically. She also pondered “why all personal property must be removed from the inmate’s cell…or why inmates must be bound with waist restraints during visits.”

She also said prison officials didn’t respond to all 29,400 comments received from the public before adopting the new protocols, as required for adoption of new state regulations.

Finally, the judge said prison officials failed to properly notify the 720 inmates on California’s death row of the new procedures.

The lawsuit challenging the new regulation was filed last year by Mitchell Sims, a condemned inmate convicted of killing a 21-year-old pizza deliveryman in 1985. Sims had killed two other Domino’s Pizza employees four days earlier in South Carolina. He’s also sentenced to die in that state.

Sims filed his lawsuit on behalf of other death row inmates like him who exhausted all their appeals and were at the head of the execution line. At least 12 inmates are in similar situations.

Sims said the new regulations were improperly drafted and violated a California law requiring detailed explanations and public comments on the changes.

Prison officials drafted those new regulations in response to a federal lawsuit filed by condemned inmate Michael Morales, who alleged that California’s lethal injection process amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. A federal judge in 2006 ordered the CDCR to revamp California entire execution process.

Besides the new regulations, the CDCR also constructed a new death chamber designed specifically for lethal injections. Prison officials previously were using the old gas chamber at San Quentin for lethal injections, which the federal judge found to be too cramped, dark and antiquated.

The judge banned executions until a resolution to Morales’ lawsuit, which was pending in San Jose. A hearing in that case was postponed until late next year while lawyers gather evidence.

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By Paul Elias