Authorities from a California state prison announced on Wed., Sept. 2, that a death row inmate has died due to natural causes. This is the fourth mortality incident this year in the state, which has not implemented death row execution since 2006.
The late prisoner named Ronald Herold Seaton, 69, had spent 26 years in the San Quentin State Prison under a death sentence due to burglary, robbery and murder, which were linked to the case of Willis Paul Jones, who died in Riverside County. He was admitted at the Marin General Hospital and later succumbed to a naturally-occurring condition.
Aside from Seaton, 69 other prison inmates sentenced to death have died due to natural causes, and 24 others have taken their own lives. Seven hundred forty seven more inmates, waiting for their sentences to be served, are detained at the Marin County state prison.
Technically, death penalty is lawful in the state of California; however, various issues questioning the measures with which lethal injection is administered, as well as political conflicts in the liberal state have left the inmates in what seems like a torturous waiting game. Aside from that, death penalty supports have dwindled in different states, including California. The Innocence Projects, which have paved the way for the acquittal of some prisoners, as well as the works of legal activists have contributed to the apprehensions. In 2014, the results of a Field Poll demonstrated that the support for the implementation of the death penalty in California has dropped to its lowest rate in 50 years. More specifically, the survey showed that the voters, who supported the capital punishment declined from 68 percent in 2011 to 54 percent in 2014. The death penalty has been restored in California in 1978; since then, only 13 inmates have been executed.
In 2014, one federal judge commented that the long wait that prisoners have to endure may be considered unconstitutional and thus may lead to uncommon and harsh sanctions such as in the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who has been in the death row since 1995. His death sentence case has been repealed and is set for another series of arguments.
The San Quentin state prison is currently in the midst of a Legionnaire's disease outbreak. So far, six inmates have been diagnosed and 95 more are presently under observation. The said disease is a severe type of pneumonia; however, authorities from the state confirmed that there have been no signs that it was Seaton's cause of death.
Photo: Ken Piorkowski | Flickr
