California’s Death Penalty Struck Down as Unconstitutional for Not Actually Killing People

California’s system of justice
is slow. It truly is. I’ve seen it take ages for some basic court
cases to get anywhere. For complicated cases, well, when I was a
small newspaper editor, I can recall one murder case ultimately
being covered by four different reporters at various points due to
staff turnover over the years.

So today’s U.S. district court ruling declaring
California’s death penalty to be unconstitutional because it’s
too slow makes a certain sense, but it does read oddly at first,
doesn’t it? The case revolves around Ernest Dewayne Jones, who has
been on death row since 1995, but obviously is not dead. The judge
notes that Jones is not alone:

Since 1978, when the current death penalty system was adopted by
California voters, over 900 people have been sentenced to death for
their crimes. Of them, only 13 have been executed. 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.
Indeed, for most, systemic delay has made their execution so
unlikely that the death sentence carefully and deliberately imposed
by the jury has been quietly transformed into one no rational jury
or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the
remote  possibility of death. As for the random few for
whom execution does become a reality, they will have languished for
so long on Death Row that their execution will serve no retributive
or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.

As such, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney has ruled
that the sentence is a violation of Eighth Amendment’s prohibition
against cruel and unusual punishment and has ordered it
vacated.

For those who want to lay the blame on those wily, hardened
criminals pulling every trick in the book to delay execution,
that’s not the case. The judge notes that a bipartisan panel has
criticized the state’s death penalty process as “plagued with
excessive delay in the appointments of counsel for direct appeals
and habeus corpus petitions, and a severe backlog in the review of
appeals and habeas petitions before the California Supreme Court.”
The state keeps sentencing people to death and then is dragging its
feet dealing with the process. Funding cuts to the Office of the
State Public Defender are blamed for the limited pool of attorneys
available to represent the defendants.

The judge also notes that after this extremely long wait, 60
percent of the handful of defendants (81 of them) who have made it
through the whole state appeals process were granted relief from
the death sentence once the case was taken up in federal
courts.

The ruling is very specific to the nature of the delays in
California and thus it’s not clear whether the case has
implications outside of the Golden State. Certainly it takes years
for other states to coordinate their executions, but it’s not
necessarily the case that California’s slow (and extremely
expensive! Let’s not forget how expensive it is! California’s
highest public salaries are in the prisons and criminal justice
spheres.) process is like those in other states.

And also, before anti-death-penalty advocates celebrate, this
ruling is about the process, not the outcome. It is not a judgment
against the use of the death penalty. It is a judgment against
California’s broken system and its inability to apply it fairly and
consistently. Of course, given California’s inability to fix
anything about any of its broken systems of governance, it may end
up ultimately killing the death penalty off anyway (such as it
is—executions have been on hold for years over concerns about the
state’s lethal injection system).

Read the judge’s ruling here.