OMAHA, Nebraska -- Nebraska's Supreme Court Friday threw out the death sentence of a man convicted of killing a 3-year-old and feeding his remains to a dog.

The ruling follows Tuesday's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to overturn more than 100 death sentences in three western U.S. states.

In both instances, the courts were acting on a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled that death sentences imposed by judges, and not juries, are unconstitutional. The San Francisco appeals court and now the Nebraska Supreme Court applied the ruling retroactively.

In its opinion, the State Supreme Court said there was enough evidence to prove that Raymond Mata Jr., 30, killed Adam Gomez, but that it had no choice but to grant him a new sentencing hearing in light of the Supreme Court's Ring vs. Arizona ruling.

Nebraska attorney general Jon Bruning said he was confident that Mata would be resentenced to death. He said the murder clearly warranted the death penalty.

The details of the three-year-old's 1999 death were so gruesome that Mata's trial was moved to another county because of pretrial publicity, centering around allegations that Mata had dismembered the boy's body and disposed of some remains by flushing them down the sewer and putting others in a dog dish.

Prosecutors alleged that Mata killed the boy in a fit of jealousy. Mata was involved with the boy’s mother, Patricia Gomez, at the time of the boy’s death. He was upset because he believed Gomez had rekindled a relationship with her former boyfriend, the boy’s father.

Mata is the second death-row inmate in Nebraska to be given a new sentencing hearing in light of that ruling.