Los Angeles ? Aiming at ending a 16-month legal moratorium on capital punishment in California, state corrections officials on Tuesday proposed new lethal injection execution procedures they say “will result in the dignified end of life” for condemned inmates.

The state acted in response to a December decision by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who concluded that the state’s implementation of the death penalty amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and may have subjected six inmates to excruciatingly painful ends.

Tuesday, attorneys for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Tilton, director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the new protocol addressed all five of the problems Fogel found with the state’s methods.

California, like three dozen other states around the country, uses a three-drug cocktail to kill condemned inmates. Corrections officials said they would stick with the three-drug protocol but would “substantially revise it.”