{"id":1684,"date":"2014-07-16T17:12:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T00:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/?p=1684"},"modified":"2018-04-02T20:17:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T03:17:00","slug":"california-death-penalty-found-unconstitutional-cruel-unusual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/california-death-penalty-found-unconstitutional-cruel-unusual\/","title":{"rendered":"California Death Penalty Found Unconstitutional: Cruel & Unusual?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Mike Rushford<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Earnest<\/a>

Earnest Dewayne Jones<\/p><\/div>\n

S<\/span>hortly after midnight on August 25, 1992, in Los Angeles, Chester Miller returned home from work and noticed the family station wagon was missing from the driveway. Mr. Miller went into his house and found his wife, Julia, lying dead at the foot of their bed. Mrs. Miller\u2019s robe was open, her nightgown was bunched above her waist, and she was naked from the waist down. A telephone cord and a purse strap had been used to tie Mrs. Miller\u2019s arms over her head, and a nightgown had been used to loosely tie her ankles together. Mrs. Miller had been gagged with two rags, one in her mouth and another around her face. Two kitchen knives were sticking out of her neck. Pieces of three other knives were found on or around her body.\u00a0\u00a0 Homicide investigators identified Earnest Dewayne Jones, who lived with Mrs. Miller’s daughter, as the murderer based upon significant evidence.<\/p>\n

The deputy medical examiner with the Los Angeles County Coroner\u2019s Office who performed the autopsy on Mrs. Miller\u2019s body concluded, on the basis of the following evidence, that she had been stabbed to death: Two knives were sticking out of Mrs. Miller\u2019s neck. She also had 14 stab wounds in her abdomen\u00a0and one in her vagina, but the fatal stab wound, which penetrated to the spine, was the one in the middle of her chest. Aside from the stab wound, there was no evidence of trauma to the vaginal region.<\/p>\n

At the crime scene, a criminalist with the Los Angeles County Coroner\u2019s Office took swabs of Mrs. Miller\u2019s vagina. Another criminalist found a great abundance of intact spermatozoa on the vaginal swab, leading him to conclude that ejaculation occurred no more than five to 10 hours before Mrs. Miller\u2019s death. \u00a0A blood sample was taken from defendant. A molecular biologist for Cellmark Diagnostics performed deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing on the blood sample taken from defendant and on the vaginal swabs taken from Mrs. Miller. This testing yields banding patterns<\/em> that are, with the exception of identical twins, unique to every individual. There is only one chance in 78 million that a random individual would have the same DNA banding pattern as defendant. The tests showed that the banding pattern in the DNA from defendant\u2019s blood sample matched the banding pattern of the semen on the vaginal swab taken from Mrs. Miller.<\/p>\n

Mike Rushford is the Executive Director of the Sacramento based\u00a0Criminal Justice Legal Foundation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Mike Rushford hortly after midnight on August 25, 1992, in Los Angeles, Chester Miller returned home from work and noticed the family station wagon was missing from the driveway. Mr. Miller went into his house and found his wife, Julia, lying dead at the foot of their bed. Mrs. Miller\u2019s robe was open, her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[398,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice-legal-foundation","category-death-penalty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1684"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3154,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions\/3154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}