An L.A. Times news story today backed up our most recent post, which highlighted one of the major impediments to implementation of the death penalty in California: 9th Circuit judges who are basing their decisions not on the law but on their personal views.
In her story, “U.S. Supreme Court again rejects most decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals,” L.A. Times staff writer Carol J. Williams reports:
The Supreme Court reversed or vacated 19 of the 26 decisions it looked at from the 9th Circuit this judicial term, issuing especially pointed critiques of the court's handling of cases involving prisoners' rights and death row reprieves.
Although the proportion of reversals was relatively in line with past years and other appellate circuits across the country, the 9th Circuit was often out of step even with the high court's liberal justices, who joined with the conservatives in 12 unanimous rulings.
In their reversals, the justices often expressed impatience with what they see as stubborn refusal by the lower court to follow Supreme Court precedent.
In short, the Supreme Court of the United States judged the 9th Circuit’s performance and found a continual refusal to follow precedent; it made pointed critiques of the 9th Circuit’s handling of death penalty cases, and determined that 9th Circuit opinions ran counter to established law. The only redeeming quality of the 9th Circuit’s decisions, perhaps, is that they succeeded in uniting a sometimes bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court – 12 of the 19 reversals were unanimous!
When we hear California State Senator Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) and other death penalty opponents disingenuously argue for an end to the death penalty in California on the grounds that it is too costly, we point to the 9th Circuit’s behavior as one of the principal reasons for those escalating costs. As we asked in our last post, is there any doubt that the death penalty here would be carried out more expeditiously if California were under the jurisdiction of the 5th Circuit, which honors the rule of law?
