A federal appeals court on Thursday removed at least one significant legal obstacle to California’s resumption of executions.

In a unanimous ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal judge’s sweeping decision last year finding California’s death penalty system unconstitutional because of decades-long delays in the handling of death row inmates’ appeals.

The ruling did not address the centerpiece of the case, instead concluding that condemned killer Ernest Dewayne Jones is legally barred from raising the delay issue at this late stage in his federal appeals.

“Many agree with (Jones) that California’s capital punishment system is dysfunctional and that the delay between sentencing and execution in California is extraordinary,” 9th Circuit Judge Susan Graber wrote for the court. “But … because (Jones) asks us to apply a novel constitutional rule, we may not assess the substantive validity of his claim.”

Los Angeles U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney had concluded that death sentences in California, where there are now more than 750 condemned killers at San Quentin, have been transformed into “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

The ruling was put on hold while the 9th Circuit weighed Attorney General Kamala Harris’ appeal. Despite her own reservations about the death penalty, Harris urged the appeals court to reverse the decision, saying in court papers the ruling is “fundamentally misguided” because any delays in reviewing the appeals of death row inmates are meant to ensure legal protections to avoid mistakes.

Harris did not comment on Thursday’s ruling. But the appeals court sided with one of the state’s arguments — that Jones did not fully present the delay issue to the California Supreme Court before turning to the federal courts, violating U.S. Supreme Court precedent in the complex area of death penalty law. Rory Little, a UC Hastings College of the Law professor, noted that the 9th Circuit’s ruling is likely to mean that Jones must return to the state Supreme Court with his appeals — ironically, adding a layer of delay to his 21-year-old case.

Legal experts had predicted the case could give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to explore whether systemic delays might render the death penalty unconstitutional, particularly with some justices already expressing reservations about the issue. But given the narrow approach in the 9th Circuit’s decision, the Jones case may no longer be ripe for Supreme Court review in the near future.

Lawyers for Jones can ask the 9th Circuit to reconsider the case with an 11-judge panel.

Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who follows national death penalty issues, predicted on his Sentencing Law and Policy blog that lawyers for death row inmates would press the issue further in the 9th Circuit and Supreme Court, a move that he added would likely further stall attempts to set execution dates in California.

However, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said the ruling will make it much tougher for death row inmates to succeed with the delay argument in California and other Western states within the 9th Circuit that permit capital punishment.

The Jones showdown amounted to a legal referendum on the nation’s most prolific death penalty state, notorious for filling its death row but failing to carry out executions. California has had just 13 executions overall since 1978, and none in nearly a decade — the result of ongoing legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection method.

California just recently introduced a new, single-drug execution method in an attempt to resolve those legal challenges, but it is unlikely to receive final approval until at least some time later next year. In addition, death penalty foes are attempting again to abolish the death penalty with a proposed measure on the 2016 ballot.

The case before the 9th Circuit involves Jones, on death row for two decades for the 1992 rape and murder of a Southern California accountant. In his ruling, Carney, a Republican appointee of former President George W. Bush, found that delays in cases like Jones’ are “systemic, and the state itself is to blame.”

Specifically, the judge determined that such lengthy delays and detours for death row inmates create an arbitrary path to execution for just a “trivial few” inmates — the type of unreliable system the U.S. Supreme Court has found amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

From failures to appoint lawyers for automatic death penalty appeals to interminable delays in the California Supreme Court and federal courts, lawyers for death row inmates argue that the problem is not fixable.

Death penalty supporters argue that the delays are unnecessary and do not violate the legal protections of death row inmates. Far more death row inmates have died of natural causes on San Quentin’s death row than have been executed since the state restored capital punishment in 1978.

Howard Mintz covers legal affairs. Contact him at 408-286-0236 or follow him at Twitter.com/hmintz