The death penalty in California: Cruel and unusual

19 years on death row is long enough

THERE are two reasons for arguing that the death penalty is a “cruel and unusual punishment”, and thus unconstitutional. One was on grim display in Arizona on July 23rd, when Joseph Wood, a double-murderer, took nearly two gasping, choking hours to die by lethal injection. The other came under legal attack on July 16th, when a federal judge, Cormac Carney, struck down capital punishment in California for being too slow and capricious.In Jones v Chappell Judge Carney struck down the 1995 death sentence of Ernest Jones (pictured), who raped and murdered his girlfriend’s mother. Mr Carney also overturned 747 other capital sentences. Awaiting execution for decades “with complete uncertainty as to when, or even whether, it will ever come,” Mr Carney wrote, is a punishment “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose.”Of the more than 900 people California has sentenced to death since 1978, only 13 have been executed. The last one died in 2006. The same year, a federal court ruled that California’s mode of lethal injection carried a risk that “an inmate will suffer pain so...



from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1sYe0Kz