USA appeals court rejects challenge to California death penalty

In July 2014, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled California’s death penalty system was unconstitutional, stating executions had become arbitrary and plagued with delays.

More than 900 people have been sentenced to death in California, but only 13 have been executed since 1978. With about 750 inmates now awaiting appeals or execution, California houses about one-quarter of all death-row inmates in the nation.

Carney ruled in the case of convicted murderer Ernest Dewayne Jones, who had been sentenced to death in 1995.

“Many agree… that California’s capital punishment system is dysfunctional and that the delay between sentencing and execution in California is extraordinary”, Justice Susan Graber wrote in Thursday’s ruling, reported the Associated Press. However, the objective of habeas corpus is to ensure that convictions and sentences complied with federal law that existed at the time, “not to provide a mechanism for the continuing re-examination of final judgments based upon later emerging legal doctrine”, she wrote.

Eight states already have used a single anesthetic drug for executions, and five others have announced plans to switch to the method, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

Carney said it operated in such a way that inmates had no idea when or even whether they would be executed.

However, today the Ninth Circuit came out with its ruling that the judge’s previous finding is precluded by US Supreme Court precedents limiting the scope of death penalty appeals.

Using Teague, the three-judge panel accordingly reversed Carney’s ruling on procedural grounds. “The bishops are committed to a restorative justice model in which we as a society care for victims, the incarcerated, their families and all those impacted by the criminal justice system”. Responding to queries from America about the state’s proposal, the California Catholic Conference issued a statement saying, “The proposed regulations are part of an ongoing legal effort to “fix” the “cruel and unusual” aspect of the death penalty”.

It would be going too far to say that the state’s new execution protocols coming on the heels of its passed euthanasia legislation necessarily indicate the kind of slippery slope that the church and others have repeatedly warned will come with assisted suicide.

There are 747 people on death row in California. A similar measure was defeated by 4 percentage points in 2012. Currently, only 16 of about 750 condemned inmates have finished the process and could be put to death – if the state were conducting executions.

Critics and supporters of capital punishment alike attribute the sparse execution rate to decades-long delays between a jury’s death sentence and the execution chamber. Nebraska lawmakers, meanwhile, repealed the practice. At least two U.S. Supreme Court judges have indicated they welcome a test case on the constitutionality of the death sentence.