In an unexpected development, a state agency has rejected California's new methodology for putting condemned inmates to death by lethal injection, and has given corrections officials until Oct. 6 to resubmit their proposal.

The decision by the Office of Administrative Law came Tuesday in a 21-page "decision of disapproval of regulatory action" and is the latest setback for the Schwarzenegger administration's beleaguered effort to resume executions.

The obscure agency is part of the state's executive branch and is run by two people appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It "ensures that ... regulations are clear, necessary, legally valid, and available to the public," according to its mission statement.

Lethal injection regulations were revised by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to satisfy a federal judge in San Jose who ruled the process as practiced in California poses an intolerable risk of cruel and unusual punishment.

In November 2007 a Marin Superior Court judge barred the revisions because they had not been subjected to public comment and vetted by the agency.

Corrections officials conducted a public hearing, received 20,000 additional comments in writing, and on April 29 submitted a 42-page rewrite of the lethal injection protocol to the agency, which had until Friday to rule on the changes.

On Tuesday, amid the state election, it quietly issued a notice that it had bounced them for a plethora of reasons. The office's 20-member staff - composed mainly of attorneys - picked the document to pieces.

The decision signed by Director Susan Lapsley notes that the state Administrative Procedures Act specifies "a regulation must be legally valid, supported by an adequate record, and easy to understand." The new lethal injection rules are none of the above, the office decided.

Parts of the new regulation conflict with existing state law, according to the decision.

For example, the new rules call for the Governor's Office, the state inspector general and the attorney general to have representatives "present in the infusion control room of the lethal injection facility." But the infusion control room is separate from any of the witness viewing rooms, and state law does not allow for additional witnesses in such a room, the decision stated. Forms mandated by the new rules are inconsistent with the rules themselves, it said.

The agency further determined that the meaning of a number of provisions is murky.

Regulations must include an explanation of the "purpose and necessity" for each section. With a few exceptions, Corrections' new rules "lapse into a ... description of the content of each section and only occasionally hint at the reasons the department chose to write the regulations the way it did," the agency said.

The decision points to a number of instances in which the department failed to respond to comments, even though the law requires a response.

As part of the 120 days the department has to address the deficiencies, there must be at least 15 additional days for public comment.

Corrections spokesman Gordon Hinkle said in a prepared statement that the department is working to resolve the problems.

"This is a part of the process to ensure we have the best regulations in place," he said.

Death penalty opponents were not so sanguine and were quick to seize the opportunity to renew their argument that capital punishment is costly and flawed.

"We are back to square one," said Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "This outcome was predictable given the CDCR's lax approach to this process. We hope the governor will respond to this development, and to more than 20,000 objections from the public, by replacing our broken and stalled death penalty process with the swift and certain justice of permanent imprisonment."