In 1995 Ernest Dewayne Jones was sentenced to death in California. He exhausted all his state appeals and lost at every turn. In 2009 Jones applied for federal Habeas Corpus relief claiming that his sentence violated his federal rights. On Wednesday, federal district court judge Cormac J. Carney finally ruled on the petition and held that Jones’ sentence is unconstitutional.
His decision was not based on the idea that it’s too harsh to execute people. Instead, Judge Carney focused on the structural problems in imposing a California death sentence:
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.
Carney said that the actual execution becomes a remote possibility transforming the sentence into something quite different:
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.
In the 1972 case, Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a death sentence is unconstitutional if it is imposed arbitrarily, or fails to serve a legitimate deterrent or retributive purpose. Judge Carney relied on that case to find that California’s system fails in every respect.
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.
Judge Carney went on to reason that the determination of who lives and who dies has nothing to do with permissible factors and everything to do with the details of how their case works through the system. For those who are executed,
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.
The Jones opinion effectively stops execution in California for now. No one has been executed in that state since 2006 anyway. The case will certainly be appealed to the Ninth Circuit and then on to the Supreme Court.
It will be interesting to see if this unique line of thinking gains any traction with appellate courts. The obvious fix might be to reduce, or accelerate the legal process for challenging a death sentence. The strange logic of Jones suggests that the more prisoners the state executes, the more likely the death penalty is to pass constitutional muster.
You can read the Jones petition for Habeas Corpus here. It’s 445 pages and raises 30 claims for relief. The winning issue is number 27, it takes up about 3.5 of those pages.
For more about what it’s like on California’s death row check out this excellent episode of The Life of the Law where reporter Nancy Mullane was granted extremely rare access to death row and interviews with prisoners.
Image from flickr, creative commons
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