The twist that will make headlines out of today's three hour Senate hearing on the 'secret' plan to build a new death chamber at San Quentin: a corrections employee testified that Governor Schwarzenegger's staff knew about the plan well before it became public... an accusation that seems to contradict the governor's own statements that the project should have been disclosed.

The revelation came in the afternoon testimony of Kingston "Bud" Prunty, the undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Prunty had been summoned to the hearing after legislators began a long series of questions about exactly who gave the OK to begin construction on the new death chamber-- a project pegged at $399,000, just under the fiscal threshold of notification to the Legislature.

Prunty told Sen. Gloria Romero (D-LA) that he was the one responsible (or one of those responsible, it wasn't completely clear) for giving the authorization to begin construction. [Hear their exchange here.]

And one of the key topics of the hearing was that U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel had never demanded that the state needs a new death chamber, but rather that the state needs to inform him of what changes the state plans to make to the death penalty process. Nonetheless, several internal state documents show that CDCR officials claimed that Judge Fogel had "ordered" them to create a new death chamber.

But then the questions went beyond who gave the OK... as senators asked Prunty who else had been at the meetings where the decision was made.

Undersecretary Prunty said that there were several meetings (which another witness said began the first week of January) about how to comply with Judge Fogel's wishes. And he said that one result of those meetings was an agreement to build a new death chamber.

And was the plan, asked Sen. Mike Machado (D-Linden), discussed in the presence of staffers from Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown?

"Yes," said Prunty. [You can hear that exchange here.]

That certainly seems to undercut the criticism of the process expressed by Schwarzenegger in a news conference on April 24, some two weeks after the death chamber project was made public.

"They went about it in the wrong way by not sharing the information and including the legislators," he then told reporters.

Late this afternoon, the governor's press secretary said that while top Schwarzenegger advisers knew that a new death chamber was the preferred plan, they did not know that it was actually being built.

This is unlikely to be the final chapter in this saga. And for some of the legislators at today's hearing, it also begs the question about fiscal accountability and transparency within the CDCR... just as the state is planning to borrow $7 billion for new prison construction.