A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued an extraordinary ruling yesterday that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional, vacating Ernest Dewayne Jones’s death sentence. In a remarkably straightforward opinion, Republican appointee Judge Cormac J. Carney found that California’s death penalty system is so unfair and arbitrary as to violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.Judge Carney found California’s capital system to be rife with delay and dysfunction. The state has sentenced more than 900 individuals to death since 1978, but has executed only 13 of them. By contrast, 94 have died of other causes, including old age, illness, and suicide. Inmates are more likely to die of other causes because of systemic delays in the appellate process that prevent execution than from execution itself. The court pointed out that death penalty cases take more than 25 years to resolve, and that the majority of that time is spent in state courts
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