BREAKING: US federal judge (9th Circuit) declares California death penalty unconstitutional. Ruling in the case of a prisoner who was condemned in 1994, Carney wrote that "inordinate and unpredictable delays have resulted in a death penalty system in which arbitrary factors determine whether an individual will actually be executed."
Sources: Agencies, Social Medias, July 16, 2014
California Death Penalty Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Says
A federal judge in Southern California ruled Wednesday that California’s death penalty was unconstitutional.
The “dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system,” wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney of United States District Court, has led to “inordinate and unpredictable” delays in the execution of inmates.
The delays, the judge wrote, means that sentences are carried out against only “a trivial few of those sentenced to death.” In essence, he wrote, sentences by juries have been transformed to “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”
In making his ruling, Judge Carney vacated the death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned on April 7, 1995. He said that more than 900 people had been sentenced to death in the state since 1978 but that only 13 had been executed.
“Allowing this system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment,” he wrote.
Source:
The New York Times, July 16, 2014
Federal judge says California's death penalty system is 'unconstitutional'
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| California Death Chamber |
"California's death penalty system is so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay that the death sentence is actually carried out against only a trivial few of those sentenced to death," he wrote.
Carney's order was related to the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for raping and killing Julia Miller in 1992. The judge vacated Jones's death sentence in the order, writing that letting California's system threaten Jones with death nearly 2 decades after his sentencing "violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."
California has the largest number of inmates on death row, but it does not carry out nearly as many executions as the states that have fewer people there. The state had 742 people on its death row at the beginning of 2014, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, significantly more than Florida (410 inmates), Texas (278 inmates) and Missouri (48 inmates). But California has not executed anyone this year - the state hasn't put an inmate to death since 2006 - while Florida and Texas have each put 7 inmates to death and Missouri has carried out 5 executions.
Since 1976, California has executed 13 people. This number is relatively low, trailing 16 other states over that span. Texas, which executes the most inmates annually, has put at least 13 people to death in each of the last 4 years and has executed 515 people since 1976. (California, 1 of 32 states in the U.S. that has the death penalty, executes inmates with lethal injection unless an inmate asks for the gas chamber.)
While inmates often work to delay executions through the appeals process, the delays in California's system are inherent to that state's actions, not due to the actions of most individual inmates, Carney wrote.
Voters in California rejected an attempt to eliminate the state's death penalty in 2012. There was a push this year to speed up the execution process and shorten appeals (an initiative supported by 3 former California governors), but it failed to make it on the ballot, so organizers are planning to make a push for November 2016.
There has been a shift in recent years away from the death penalty, with 1/3 of the states that have banned capital punishment doing so since 2007. The last state to abolish the death penalty was Maryland last year, though New Hampshire came very, very close earlier this year.
Still, executions are happening less often than they did even 2 decades ago, a decline that has occurred as American support for capital punishment has also fallen.
A botched lethal injection in Oklahoma earlier this year drew renewed attention to executions. That high-profile episode was followed by 7 weeks without any executions in the U.S., after which 3 states carried out 3 in less than 24 hours.
Source: The Washington Post, July 16, 2014
