COURT RULES CALIFORNIA'S DEATH PENALTY UNCONSTITUTIONAL

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By Miriam Raftery

July 17,2014 (San Diego’s East County)—A federal judge has ruled that California’s death penalty enforcement has become so arbitrary and lengthy that it amounts to a violation of the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  The ruling may be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals; California Attorney General Kamala Harris is currently reviewing the ruling.

Since 1978, only 13 of the 900 people assigned to Death Row in California have been executed –and none since 2006. Another 94 died of natural causes.  Death Row inmates are placed in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day, and some have languished there for decades.

U.S.  District Judge Cormac J. Carney, who was appointed by President George W. Bush,  said that “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. “ With the death penalty imposed so rarely and so arbitrarily, executions serve “no retribution or deterrent purpose,” the judge concluded.

The ruling came in the case of a petition filed by death row inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced nearly 20 years ago to die for raping and murdering his girlfriend’s mother.  He had previously been paroled for an earlier rape of a former girlfriend’s mother. 

Executions in the state were halted in 2006 due to a moratorium.  In 2010, state officials sought to executive a convicted murder and rapist of a teen girl, but state and federal courts blocked the action over concerns over whether lethal injections were humane punishments. 

The court’s recent decision has drawn mixed reactions.

"Victims and their families need and deserve justice. This ruling denies them and society justice,” said Republican State Senator Jim Nielsen, former chairman of the California Board of Prison Terms, the New York Times reports. Senator Nielsen adds, “The current system needs improvement, but to completely get rid of the death penalty is unconscionable for victims and their families and society.”

But Matt Cherry, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, told CNN that it’s time to replace California’s “broken” death penalty system with life in prison without the possibility of parole.”  He concludes, “That’s the best way to ensure that convicted killers remain behind bars until they die, without wasting tens of millions of tax dollars every year on needless appeals.”

 

 


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