Ninth Circuit Hears Arguments on Constitutionality of California Death Penalty

On August 31, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard argu­ment in Jones v. Davis, an appeal by California of the 2014 U.S. District Court rul­ing that declared California’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney held that the decades-long delays caused by California’s fail­ure to pro­vide lawyers for near­ly 350 of its death-row pris­on­ers made its death penal­ty sys­tem uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly cru­el and unusu­al. He said that the ​“ran­dom few” whom California even­tu­al­ly exe­cutes — to date, just 13 out of more than 900 indi­vid­u­als sen­tenced to death — ​“will have lan­guished for so long on death row that their exe­cu­tion will serve no ret­ribu­tive or deter­rent pur­pose and will be arbi­trary.” Lawyer Michael Laurence (pic­tured, left), rep­re­sent­ing death row inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, called the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem ​“dys­func­tion­al.” He argued that California’s death penal­ty pro­duces the same type of arbi­trary out­comes that led the Supreme Court to inval­i­date death penal­ty statutes nation­wide in 1972 in the land­mark case of Furman v. Georgia. Lawyers from the California Attorney General’s Office argued that the delays in this case are dif­fer­ent from the issues pre­sent­ed to the Court in Furman and that the lengthy appeals process is evi­dence of care­ful efforts to pro­tect the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of peo­ple who have been sen­tenced to death. The Ninth Circuit must decide whether to address the sub­stance of Jones’ claim or side­step the issue on pro­ce­dur­al grounds. If it upholds Judge Carney’s rul­ing, the sen­tences of more than 700 peo­ple on California’s death row could be over­turned and replaced with sen­tences of life without parole.

(E. Eckholm, ​“California Defends Its Review Process in Appeal to Preserve Death Penalty,” The New York Times, August 31, 2015; B. Egelko, ​“Federal judges hint they’ll bow out of chal­lenge to death penal­ty,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 31, 2015. Image from live feed of 9^th Circuit argu­ment.) See Arbitrariness and States with Executions on Hold.