Posted: March 10, 2015
On March 6, several stakeholders in California's death penalty system filed supportive briefs urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold a District Court
ruling that the state's death penalty is unconstitutional. The 9th
Circuit is considering the state's appeal in the case of Ernest Jones,
whose death sentence was overturned by Judge Cormac Carney (pictured).
In an amicus brief on behalf of Jones, Bethany Webb, whose sister was
murdered in 2011, said, "California's death penalty is a charade. My
sister’s killer is going to die of old age before an execution will ever
be carried out. The death penalty retraumatizes families like mine and
forces them to endure a decades-long cycle of waiting, court hearings,
and uncertainty. It is cruel to continue propping up a system that
encourages victims’ families to wait decades for an execution that may
never come." State legislators and legal scholars also filed briefs in
the case. Senator Mark Leno, joined by other state legislators, wrote,
"The facts are overwhelmingly clear: California’s death penalty system
is broken and clearly there’s no political will to try to address the
many flaws that plague the system. The death penalty is exorbitantly
costly, arbitrarily applied, and serves no legitimate purpose whatsoever
in its current condition. The only reasonable solution is to replace
the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of
parole."
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