Professor Robert Weisberg comments on the jurisdiction that the federal government has over certain issues for The San Francisco Chronicle.

California voters came within a few percentage points of repealing the state’s death penalty law in 2012 and may consider the issue again next year. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court is preparing to review a judge’s ruling that declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional because of decades-long delays, for which the state was found largely responsible, and arbitrary punishments. Findings by another judge of numerous flaws in the state’s lethal injection procedures have halted executions at San Quentin since 2006.

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But Robert Weisberg, a Stanford criminal law professor, said such disparities are the consequence of having national laws that sometimes conflict with state statutes, in areas that range from medical marijuana to school segregation to capital punishment. ”It’s a little late in the game to complain that people in a state shouldn’t be subject to federal laws that they don’t like,” Weisberg said.