California’s death penalty is unconstitutional because of extraordinary delays and its uncertainty, a federal judge has ruled.
“Typically, the lapse of time between sentence and execution is 25 years, twice the national average, and is growing wider each year,” said U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
California voters adopted the current death penalty system in 1978. Since then, more than 900 people have been sentenced to die. However, only 13 have been executed.
“For the rest, the dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system has resulted, and will continue to result, in an inordinate and unpredictable period of delay preceding their actual execution.” the judge said.
“Indeed, for most, systemic delay has made their execution so unlikely that the death sentence carefully and deliberately imposed by the jury has been quietly transformed into one no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.
“As for the random few for whom execution does become a reality, they will have languished for so long on Death Row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.”
The ruling came in the case of Death Row inmate Ernest DeWayne Jones, reported the Chronicle. Carney ruled the state’s death sentence law “violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Typically, the lapse of time between sentence and execution is 25 years”
On April 7, 1995, Jones was condemned for killing and raping his girlfriend’s mother, Julia Miller, 10 months after being paroled for a previous rape.
“Nearly two decades later, Mr. Jones remains on California’s Death Row, awaiting his execution, but with complete uncertainty as to when, or even whether, it will ever come,” said Carney.
Explaining why the California death penalty system is so dysfunctional, Carney said, “Those sentenced to death in California proceed through a post-conviction review process that begins with a mandatory automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court. If that appeal is denied, an inmate may seek collateral review of the death sentence, again from the California Supreme Court. If state habeas relief is denied, an inmate may then pursue collateral review of the death sentence from the federal courts. If relief is denied at each of these levels, then the inmate may be 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,” the judge wrote.
“The California Supreme Court generally hears between 20 and 25 death penalty appeals per year, and so another two to three years will likely pass before arguments are scheduled and the case is subsequently decided,” the judge said.
According to the Chronicle, years will have elapsed, with inmates spending much of that time waiting for counsel to be appointed and for an oral argument to be scheduled. It takes between 11.7 and 13.7 years from the sentence of death before the California Supreme Court disposes of the automatic direct appeal.
Carney said, the delays “have created a system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed,” Los Angeles Times reported.
“For those whose challenge to the state’s death sentence is ultimately denied at each level of review, the process will likely take 25 years or more,” Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen wrote in his book Death Penalty Appeals and Habeas Proceeding: The California Experience.
Uelmen told the Los Angeles Times that it is conceivable that the U.S. Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit could say California’s system is so dysfunctional that it cannot be sustained.
A spokesperson for state Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said her office was reviewing the decision.
