Pasadena Court Hears Death Penalty Arguments in Case That Affects 749 Death Row Prisoners

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena will hear oral arguments Monday in a case that could lead to California’s death penalty being declared unconstitutional.

At stake in the hearing is the State Attorney General’s appeal of a ruling made last year by Central California U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney that effectively vacated or annulled the death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones.

Jones had been convicted for the rape and murder of Julia Miller in 1992 and sentenced to death in 1995. The Supreme Court of California affirmed the sentence 1n 2003.

Last year, Carney issued a ruling lambasting California’s long death penalty process and calling capital punishment “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

In his ruling, Carney wrote, “Allowing the system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eight Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”

In a court filing, lawyers in California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris’s office argued that the pace of the death penalty review process under California law reflects the state’s commitment to justice.

“Everyone involved in this process – counsel for the state, counsel for capital defendants, and the courts themselves – works carefully and methodically to ensure that death sentences are lawfully imposed and carried out only in appropriate cases,” the filing said. The lawyers described the process as taking a “suitably deliberate pace” that is a safeguard against “arbitrariness and error.”

Carney is a George W. Bush appointee. The appeals court panel is composed of Democratic appointees – Judges Susan Graber, Johnnie Rawlinson and Paul Watford – who are now facing a potentially momentous decision on an issue that had divided California and its leaders for a long time.

The Attorney General intends to argue that there is no legitimate legal basis for Carney’s 2014 ruling, according to a legal brief from Harris’ office. It also argued the process provides for necessary protection to defendants.

“The court mistook its policy critique as a proper basis for legal judgment,” the brief said.

In support of the state, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation said “a delay in the execution of the death penalty is not a violation of the rights of the defendant.”

“A delay in the execution of the death penalty is not a violation of the rights of the defendant,” the Foundation’s legal director Kent Scheidegger wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief. “He’s getting to live out a longer life than he was sentenced to, than he should have received. That’s not a constitutional violation against the defendant. The excessive delays are a violation of the rights of the victim, and we should be fixing them.”

Other groups campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty have also filed briefs in the case.

San Francisco-based Death Penalty Focus said the state is “uniquely dysfunctional in its death penalty system.”

“It’s by far the largest death penalty system in the country,” Matt Cherry, DPF’s Executive Director, said, “It is by far the most costly, and it has very little effectiveness in the way it’s been run for the last 40 years.”

If the lawyers for Jones are victorious, the case could affect the fate of more than 740 prisoners now on death row at San Quentin State Prison and send legal ripples across the country.

Either way, both sides agree that the case raises issues about the administration of capital punishment that are likely to reach the Supreme Court over time.