18 July 2017 :
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a death sentence for Maria Del Rosio Alfaro, convicted of murdering a 9-year-old girl in 1990. Alfaro, 45, Hispanic, was sentenced to death in 1992 for fatally stabbing Autumn Wallace during a burglary and robbery of her family's home on June 15, 1990. Alfaro was 18 at the time and a drug addict. She had 4 children when she was sentenced to death at age 20. On February 10, 2015, US District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney vacated Alfaro's death sentence on the grounds that delays in California's capital punishment system produced arbitrary results in violation of the U.S. Constitution. But a 3-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday that Alfaro should have raised that claim 1st in state court.
