California prison authorities shared that a prison inmate has died last week at Marin General Hospital near San Francisco from natural causes. Ronald Harold Seaton, 69, had spent 26 years on death row for murder.

It is the fourth case this year in California that has not carried out an execution since 2006. In California, death penalty is technically legal. But due to legal challenges involved with the state's lethal injection practices has led inmates to be in jail until their natural deaths.

It has been found that 69, including this case, have died of natural causes while being on death row, and 24 inmates have committed suicide. There are 747 others who have been waiting execution and are at San Quentin, in Marin County near San Francisco.

In California and other states, support for the death appeal has stopped amid concerns that the drugs used injections lead to painful deaths. A federal judge last year has said that such a lengthy wait for execution is not right. He said the same in the case of Ernest Dewayne Jones.

The judge has even overturned Jones' death sentence, but the case is under appeal. Last year, a Field Poll was carried out in which 58% showed support for the death penalty, a decline from 2011 when the percentage was 68.

Seaton was given punishment in 1986 in a murder, robbery and burglary in connection with the death of Willis Paul Jones in Riverside County. The cause of death will be determined by the coroner.