Judge Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the state's death penalty is unconstitutional Wednesday. The state put a hold on executions in 2005, leaving 748 people on death row, including inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, whose execution Carney vacated. "Allowing this system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment," he wrote. Nearly half of the people on California's death row have been waiting for more than 19 years and only 13 of the 900 sentenced to death by the state since 1978 have been killed.