A federal
judge has ruled that California's death penalty is unconstitutional. Executions
have been on hold in California since 2006 due to concerns that inmates suffer
extreme pain from lethal injection.
Deutsche Welle, 17 July 2014
California's
system of capital punishment violates the US constitution's prohibition against
cruel and unusual punishment, US District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled on
Wednesday.
Carney said
that arbitrary factors determine whether or not a death sentence is actually
carried out, "not legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date
of the death sentence." Due to a lengthy appeals process, most condemned
inmates sit on death row for decades and are more likely to die from natural
causes.
"Inordinate
and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very
few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will
be, executed by the State," Carney wrote.
Since
California voters adopted the state's current system of capital punishment 35
years ago, 900 people have been sentenced to death. But executions have been
carried out in only 13 of those cases.
'Broken
beyond repair'
Anti-death
penalty activist Gil Garcetti, a former Los Angeles County district attorney,
called Wednesday's ruling "truly historic."
"It
further proves that the death penalty is broken beyond repair," Garcetti
said, calling for capital punishment to be replaced with life imprisonment
without parole.
In 2006, a
federal judge suspended all executions in California out of concern that the
state's procedures for administering lethal injection created too great a risk
that the inmate would suffer from severe pain.
slk/crh (AP, dpa)
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