Debate focuses on whether long delays in carrying out executions violate Constitution
A federal appeals court in Pasadena, Calif., will hear arguments Monday over whether California’s death penalty violates the Constitution, the latest flash point in an escalating nationwide debate about states’ capital punishment systems.
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| The San Quentin State Prison. Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters |
Three judges of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will consider a ruling by a federal trial judge last year that found the state’s death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated its long-held position that capital punishment, when administered properly, is constitutional.
But the opinion by U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney in Santa Ana, Calif., last year found California’s system to be “so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay” that it violates the Eighth Amendment.
The judge, in tossing out the 1995 death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones for murder, pointed to several statistics to support his conclusion that the death penalty in California essentially amounts to “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”
Only 13 of the 900 people sentenced to die since 1978 have been executed, wrote Judge Carney, while, 94 death-row inmates have died from natural causes.Read the rest of the story HERE.
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