Is the Death Penalty Unconstitutional?

Posted on July 16, 2014 Updated on July 18, 2014

Is there ever a good reason to take a human life? If one of your relatives were murdered, what would justice look like to you? Is it wrong to take an eye for an eye? Or is it more painful, and just, to let the guilty individual rot in prison for the rest of their life?

According to U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, today more than 900 individuals in the state of California have been sentenced to death row since 1978. But only 13 of them were executed.

This afternoon’s Los Angeles Times article reported on how Carney scrutinized this apparent flaw in administering the death penalty. He ultimately ruled that lengthy delays and resulting uncertainty as to when or even if an inmate will be executed are in violation of human rights regardless of incarceration. Carney declared the state’s death penalty is “dysfunctional” because sentences have been reduced in essence to “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.” Read the rest of this entry »