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United States District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California has ruled that “[i]nordinate and unpredictable delay” in California death penalty cases post-trial

has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State. It has resulted in a system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed. And it has resulted in a system that serves no penological purpose. Such a system is unconstitutional.

Therefore, Judge Carney vacated the death sentence of Ernest Jones. Jones v. Chappell, ___ F.Supp.2d ___, 2014 WL 3567365 (C.D. Cal. July 16, 2014).

In DeBruce v. Commissioner, Alabama Department of Corrections, (11th Cir. July 15, 2014), a robbery-murder case, the Eleventh Circuit (Wilson; Martin concurring; Tjoflat dissenting) found that the attorney retained by DeBruce’s family some three to four weeks before the capital trial began was ineffective as to the sentencing phase. The panel majority found, inter alia, that even if it “accept[ed] the state court's factual determination that trial counsel made a strategic decision not to investigate mitigation evidence based on the results of the pre-trial report governing DeBruce's competency to stand trial, that decision could not have been reasonable as it would have been based on a failure to understand the law. Because no lawyer could reasonably have made a strategic decision to forego the pursuit of mitigation evidence based on the results of the pre-trial report governing competency to stand trial, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals' conclusion to the contrary constitutes an unreasonable application of Strickland's performance prong.” (Citations omitted.)