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A federal appeals court on Thursday reversed a lower court鈥檚 ruling聽that found California's聽death聽penalty聽was unconstitutional because of excessive delays.

In a unanimous decision, the three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that the long delays prisoners face on death row do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

The case centered on a novel constitutional theory that claims death row inmates' sentences have been transformed from one of death to one of 鈥済rave uncertainty and torture.鈥� The judges wrote in their decision that the theory has 鈥渘o support鈥� in legal precedent, 鈥渘or is it supported by logic.鈥�

US District Judge Cormac Carney put the new legal theory to the test last year when he called California鈥檚 system 鈥渃ompletely dysfunctional鈥� and ruled that it led to arbitrary executions.

鈥淐alifornia鈥檚 death penalty system is so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay that the death sentence is actually carried out against only a trivial few of those sentenced to death,鈥� Judge Carney聽wrote in his order.

The appeals court said it would not weigh the validity of the claim by a murderer on death聽row for two decades because the lower court had to apply federal law at the time of his conviction and not a novel constitutional rule. Nonetheless, the three-judge panel agreed that California's capital punishment system is dysfunctional.

Prosecutors appealed Carney's ruling in the case of Ernest DeWayne Jones, a Los Angeles man sentenced to die for the 1992 rape and murder of his girlfriend's mother.

Mr. Jones said in his appeal that the state didn't provide a fair and timely review of his case and that the conditions on death聽row constituted torture. His lawyer could appeal Thursday鈥檚 ruling to a larger panel of the 9th Circuit, reports the Los Angeles Times.

California has the largest death-row population in the country, but the state has rarely carried out executions in recent years. Of the more than 900 people who have been sentenced to聽death since 1978, only 13 have been executed.

Yet California has shown signs that it may be聽getting closer to resuming lethal injections, reports the Washington Post. While the state聽has not carried out an execution since 2006, the state proposed a new execution protocol last week after a federal judge ordered an overhaul of the state's procedures for lethal injection.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.