A U.S. federal judge has ruled that California’s application of capital punishment is so “dysfunctional” that it is unconstitutional, a decision that is likely to spur legal challenges to the death penalty across the country.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of Orange County, California, said that the state’s death penalty has created long delays and uncertainty for death row inmates, many of whom would never be executed.
His decision will impact the case of a California death row inmate, Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to death for raping and killing his girlfriend’s mother in 1995.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has frequently upheld the constitutionality of the capital punishment since 1972, it has on occasion determined that the death penalty can violate the constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.”
According to reports, nearly 40 per cent of California’s 748 death row inmates have been languishing in prison for more than 19 years, and no one has been executed since 2006.
Noting that more than 900 people were sentenced to death in California since 1978 but only 13 have been executed, Judge Carney wrote, “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.”
Speaking to The Hindu , Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that several others such as a former Chief Justice of California had also labelled the death penalty there “dysfunctional,” leading to this week’s finding that, essentially, “it is so haphazard and unpredictable that it is unconstitutional.”
While Mr. Dieter said that this ruling would force California to fix the death penalty or do away with it entirely, he added that it would not be easy to “fix,” because, for example, fast-tracking cases by providing fewer testimonies or less legal representation could result in more innocent people being executed, and in any case the cost estimated to fix this problem was in the range of $100 million per year.
He further noted that the issue raised in California exists in other states too, and “Many states have had hardly any executions in the last ten to 20 years [so] it is a percolating issue in other states and other courts, a national problem.”
