USA: FEDERAL APPEALS COURT REVERSES RULING THAT SAID CALIFORNIA'S DEATH PENALTY SYSTEM IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

November 12, 2015: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld California's death penalty system Thursday, reversing a judge's order last year that had decried the state's system as unconstitutional because of its extensive delays.
In an order last year, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney had said California's system was "completely dysfunctional." "California's death penalty system is so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay that the death sentence is actually carried out against only a trivial few of those sentenced to death," Carney wrote in his order. That order was reversed Thursday by a unanimous 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
The ruling did not address the centerpiece of the case, instead concluding that condemned killer Ernest Dewayne Jones is legally barred from raising the delay issue at this late stage in his federal appeals. "Many agree with (Jones) that California's capital punishment system is dysfunctional and that the delay between sentencing and execution in California is extraordinary," 9th Circuit Judge Susan Graber wrote for the court. "But ... because (Jones) asks us to apply a novel constitutional rule, we may not assess the substantive validity of his claim." Carney's order, and the appeals court's ruling Thursday, involve the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for raping and killing Julia Miller in 1992.
Carney had vacated Jones's death sentence in the order, writing that letting California's system threaten Jones with death nearly 2 decades after his sentencing "violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."
California authorities had argued in favor of overturning Carney's ruling, which the state called "fundamentally misguided" in 1 filing submitted by Kamala D. Harris, the state's attorney general, and Edward DuMont, its solicitor general, among others. The state had argued that there was "no legal basis" for the district court to declare a system they described as thorough, careful and necessary. The case is Jones v. Davis. (Source: Washington Post, 12/11/2015)