A FEDERAL appeals court overturned a lower court’s ruling that California’s death penalty process was unconstitutional, on grounds that the system-wide appeals were flawed and taking too long.
U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled the system unconstitutional on July 16, 2014, saying it is “arbitrary and plagued with delay,” reported the Los Angeles Times.
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, Nov. 12 rejected Judge Carney’s argument on a technicality that it did not address the question of whether life on death row in California constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”–thus upholding the state’s cap-it-al pun-ish-ment sys-tem.
“The idea that death row inmates’ sentences have been transformed from one of death to one of ‘grave uncertainty and torture’ has no support in legal precedent, nor is it supported by logic,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.
Lawyers arguing both sides of the case said the appellate ruling was decided “on largely technical grounds, and leaves unanswered the larger question of whether lengthy delays are unconstitutional.”
“The elephant is still in the room,” commented lawyer John Phillipsborn, who intervened in the case on behalf of criminal defense lawyers in California.
Carney vacated the 20-year-old death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who petitioned the court to determine whether his death sentence was valid, said CNN.
In 1995, Jones was convicted and sentenced to death for raping and killing his girlfriend’s mother, 50-year-old Julia Miller, and has also served time in prison for raping the mother of a previous girlfriend. In 2003, the California Supreme Court upheld Jones’ conviction of first-degree murder and charges of rape.
Judge Carney wrote: “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.”
Delays in the case had created a “system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones, like the nature of the crime or the date of a death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed,” Carney said, also noting that a death row inmate faced “complete uncertainty” as to when or if he or she would be executed.
Mr. Jones’ legal team had “asked the court to consider what would be a new constitutional rule in a habeas corpus case (determining whether imprisonment is valid). Most are barred by a 1989 ruling in Teague v. Lane,” wrote Judge Susan P. Graber in the official opinion for the appeals panel.
Graber added the decision was based on the legal maneuvers in the case, not whether the number of years death penalty cases often take in the California system was unconstitutional.
“Many agree with petitioner that California’s capital punishment system is dysfunctional and that the delay between sentencing and execution in California is extraordinary,” Graber, a Clinton appointee, wrote.
“But, ‘the purpose of federal habeas corpus is to ensure that state convictions comply with the federal law in existence at the time the conviction became final, and not to provide a mechanism for the continuing re-examination of final judgments based upon later emerging legal doctrine’,” she continued, quoting an older 1990 habeas case.
Judge Paul J. Watford agreed that Carney’s ruling had to be struck down, but added that “it should have been overturned on the grounds that the California Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the precise issue in the case–whether arbitrary delay deprives the death penalty of any deterrent value.”
If that had happened, the case would have returned to the California Supreme Court, which has previously said it would be willing to consider Carney’s theory.
Jones’ lawyers could still appeal to the Court of Appeals’ ruling to a larger panel of the Ninth Circuit.
According to reports, there are currently 747 people on death row in California. No one has been executed since 2006. Executions will remain suspended, pending separate legal arguments about whether lethal injections are constitutional, reported BBC News.
Since 1978, over 900 people in California have been sentenced to death row, where inmates spend 23 hours alone in their cells.
Of those 900, 13 were executed; as of 2014, 94 have died of other causes. Many inmates have been waiting on death row for over 19 years.
