On July 16, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney (pic­tured) held that the delays and arbi­trari­ness of California​’s death penal­ty sys­tem ren­dered it uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Judge Carney vacat­ed the death sen­tence of Ernest Jones, who has spent near­ly 20 years on death row. On August 21, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced the state will appeal the rul­ing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Below are excerpts from Judge Carney’s ruling:

  • The Eighth Amendment pro­hibits the impo­si­tion of cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment by the state. Although rea­son­able peo­ple may debate whether the death penal­ty offends that pro­scrip­tion, no ratio­nal per­son can ques­tion that the exe­cu­tion of an indi­vid­ual car­ries with it the solemn oblig­a­tion of the gov­ern­ment to ensure that the pun­ish­ment is not arbi­trar­i­ly imposed and that it fur­thers the inter­ests of society. 
  • Inordinate and unpre­dictable delay has result­ed in a death penal­ty sys­tem in which very few of the hun­dreds of indi­vid­u­als sen­tenced to death have been, or even will be, exe­cut­ed by the State. It has result­ed in a sys­tem in which 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. And it has result­ed in a sys­tem that serves no peno­log­i­cal pur­pose. Such a sys­tem is unconstitutional.
  • Of course, for an arbi­trar­i­ly select­ed few of the 748 inmates cur­rent­ly on Death Row, that remote pos­si­bil­i­ty [of exe­cu­tion] may well be real­ized. Yet their selec­tion for exe­cu­tion will not depend on whether their crime was one of pas­sion or of pre­med­i­ta­tion, on whether they killed one per­son or ten, or on any oth­er proxy for the rel­a­tive peno­log­i­cal val­ue that will be achieved by exe­cut­ing that inmate over any oth­er. Nor will it even depend on the per­haps neu­tral cri­te­ri­on of exe­cut­ing inmates in the order in which they arrived on Death Row. Rather, it will depend upon a fac­tor large­ly out­side an inmate’s con­trol, and whol­ly divorced from the peno­log­i­cal pur­pos­es the State sought to achieve by sen­tenc­ing him to death in the first instance: how quick­ly the inmate pro­ceeds through the State’s dys­func­tion­al post-con­vic­tion review process.
  • Of the more than 900 indi­vid­u­als that have been sen­tenced to death since 1978, only 13 have been exe­cut­ed. For every one inmate exe­cut­ed by California, sev­en have died on Death Row, most from nat­ur­al caus­es. The review process takes an aver­age of 25 years, and the delay is only get­ting longer. Indeed, no inmate has been exe­cut­ed since 2006, and there is no evi­dence to sug­gest that exe­cu­tions will resume in the rea­son­ably near future.
  • The rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of an indi­vid­ual con­tem­plat­ing a cap­i­tal crime in California then is that if he is caught, it does not mat­ter whether he is sen­tenced to death — he real­is­ti­cal­ly faces only life impris­on­ment. Under such a sys­tem, the death penal­ty is about as effec­tive a deter­rent to cap­i­tal crime as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a light­ning strike is to going out­side in the rain.
  • For all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es then, a sen­tence of death in California is a sen­tence of life impris­on­ment with the remote pos­si­bil­i­ty of death — a sen­tence no ratio­nal leg­is­la­ture or jury could ever impose.

(Jones v. Chappell, No.: CV 09 – 02158 (U.S. Dist. Ct. Central Dist. of CA, July 16, 2014)). See Arbitrariness and States With Executions on Hold.

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