Federal Judge Rules California Death Penalty Unconstitutional

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I can't wait to hear republicans freaking out tomorrow, "activist judges in black robes overrode the will of the people".

Quite likely, even tho Carney was appointed by Dubya.

Still, I'm dubious this will stand.  While not entirely blameless, a good deal of the delay California has been having in implementing capital punishment is because of various court cases involving not only Federal law, but also State law.  To then use court-imposed delays as a justification for a court to find that California's system is unconstitutional seems highly improper.  At most, I could see specific cases that have been excessively dragged out being struck down by the courts while leaving open the possibility that once the kinks in its system are straightened out, California would be able to resume implementation of the death penalty.  A wholesale striking down of the death penalty for all cases where it currently is under consideration seems like judicial overreach to me.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

To put California's death penalty into perspective, here are the pertinent facts.

• There are 742 inmates currently on California's death row.
• There have only been 13 executions since 1992, and no inmate has been executed since 2006.
• The petitioner in this case has been on death row for 19 years.

California's penal system is an uneven, overcrowded mess and arguably one of the worst in the country. The possibility of the state "getting the kinks in its system straightened out" without the courts demanding it are about as close to 0 as you could possibly get.

The principal reason that is the case is because of various court imposed moratoriums to resolve specific issues, that I agree needed to be resolved.  But for a court to then say as it has in this case, you're taking too long, therefore we're going to not allow you to use capital punishment at all is absolutely ridiculous.  I can see a court saying, you've taken too long to resolve those issues in these particular cases, therefore you've lost the chance to use capital punishment in them, but once you've gotten your act together, you can go forward.

Yeah, California doesn't seem likely to much to resolve them any time soon, especially if anti-justice forces who can't get a repeal of just retribution thru the legislature need only block efforts to implement justice to get a de facto repeal.

Incidentally, just to be clear, the ridiculous amount of time between passing sentence and executing sentence in capital cases in the US is the principal reason I'm in favor of scrapping capital punishment here.  I favor having capital punishment available as an option in the abstract, but our current system is broken, and not just in California.  I just find the reasoning used here to justify a judicial end to the death penalty in California to be detrimental to the good functioning of a republic.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

States without a death penalty have a lower murder rate.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-penalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates

So?  Would it not make sense that areas with higher murder rates would be more likely to support the use of capital punishment?  This sort of raw data really shows nothing.