Federal Judge Rules California's Death Penalty Unconstitutional

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney has ruled that decades-long delays in carrying out the death penalty sentence of an inmate violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment, the Los Angeles Times reports. Whether the ruling will be upheld on appeal is uncertain. "'I think it has a shot in the 9th Circuit, but I don't know about the U.S. Supreme Court,'" Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor and who was chairman of a "state commission that concluded the system needed substantially more money to operate effectively," told the LA Times. '"It is conceivable that the U.S. Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit could say California is such an outlier — its system is so dysfunctional, with twice the national delay — that it cannot be sustained,"' Uelmen added.