I just finished reading a profile of Justice John Paul Stevens in this week’s New Yorker. In it, they mention his concurring opinion in the case Baze v. Rees, which I read, and found so compelling, I wanted to share most of it with you here. I am not trying to tell you to think a certain way, nor am I trying to espouse some point of view about the death penalty on this blog, I simply think this is one of the most well-reasoned examinations of the death penalty I have read. I am interested to know your opinion in the matter - let me hear from you in the comments below. Without further ado, here is an excerpt
from Justice Stevens’ concurring opinion in Baze v. Rees.
The thoughtful opinions written by The Chief Justice and by Justice Ginsburg have persuaded me that current decisions by state legislatures, by the Congress of the United States, and by this Court to retain the death penalty as a part of our law are the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process that weighs the costs and risks of administering that penalty against its identifiable benefits, and rest in part on a faulty assumption about the retributive force of the death penalty.
In Gregg v. Georgia,
428 U. S. 153 (1976) , we explained that unless a criminal sanction serves a legitimate penological function, it constitutes “gratuitous infliction of suffering” in violation of the
Eighth Amendment . We then identified three societal purposes for death as a sanction: incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. See id., at 183, and n. 28 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.). In the past three decades, however, each of these rationales has been called into question.
While incapacitation may have been a legitimate rationale in 1976, the recent rise in statutes providing for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole demonstrates that incapacitation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient justification for the death penalty. Moreover, a recent poll indicates that support for the death penalty drops significantly when life without the possibility of parole is presented as an alternative option. And the available sociological evidence suggests that juries are less likely to impose the death penalty when life without parole is available as a sentence.
The legitimacy of deterrence as an acceptable justification for the death penalty is also questionable, at best. Despite 30 years of empirical research in the area, there remains no reliable statistical evidence that capital punishment in fact deters potential offenders. In the absence of such evidence, deterrence cannot serve as a sufficient penological justification for this uniquely severe and irrevocable punishment.
We are left, then, with retribution as the primary rationale for imposing the death penalty. And indeed, it is the retribution rationale that animates much of the remaining enthusiasm for the death penalty. As Lord Justice Denning argued in 1950, “ ‘some crimes are so outrageous that society insists on adequate punishment, because the wrong-doer deserves it, irrespective of whether it is a deterrent or not.’ ” See Gregg, 428 U. S., at 184, n. 30. Our
Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has narrowed the class of offenders eligible for the death penalty to include only those who have committed outrageous crimes defined by specific aggravating factors. It is the cruel treatment of victims that provides the most persuasive arguments for prosecutors seeking the death penalty. A natural response to such heinous crimes is a thirst for vengeance.
At the same time, however, as the thoughtful opinions by The Chief Justice and Justice Ginsburg make pellucidly clear, our society has moved away from public and painful retribution towards ever more humane forms of punishment. State-sanctioned killing is therefore becoming more and more anachronistic. In an attempt to bring executions in line with our evolving standards of decency, we have adopted increasingly less painful methods of execution, and then declared previous methods barbaric and archaic. But by requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the
Eighth Amendment ’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based. See, e.g., Kaufman-Osborn, Regulating Death: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State, 111 Yale L. J. 681, 704 (2001) (explaining that there is “a tension between our desire to realize the claims of retribution by killing those who kill, and … a method [of execution] that, because it seems to do no harm other than killing, cannot satisfy the intuitive sense of equivalence that informs this conception of justice”); A. Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition 60–84 (2001).
Full recognition of the diminishing force of the principal rationales for retaining the death penalty should lead this Court and legislatures to reexamine the question recently posed by Professor Salinas, a former Texas prosecutor and judge: “Is it time to Kill the Death Penalty?” See Salinas, 34Am. J. Crim. L. 39 (2006). The time for a dispassionate, impartial comparison of the enormous costs that death penalty litigation imposes on society with the benefits that it produces has surely arrived.
III
“[A] penalty may be cruel and unusual because it is excessive and serves no valid legislative purpose.” Furman v. Georgia,
408 U. S. 238, 331 (1972) (Marshall, J., concurring); see also id., at 332 (“The entire thrust of the
Eighth Amendment is, in short, against ‘that which is excessive’ ”). Our cases holding that certain sanctions are “excessive,” and therefore prohibited by the
Eighth Amendment , have relied heavily on “objective criteria,” such as legislative enactments. See, e.g., Solem v. Helm,
463 U. S. 277, 292 (1983) ; Harmelin v. Michigan,
501 U. S. 957 (1991) ; United States v. Bajakajian,
524 U. S. 321 (1998) . In our recent decision in Atkins v. Virginia,
536 U. S. 304 (2002) , holding that death is an excessive sanction for a mentally retarded defendant, we also relied heavily on opinions written by Justice White holding that the death penalty is an excessive punishment for the crime of raping a 16-year-old woman, Coker v. Georgia,
433 U. S. 584 (1977) , and for a murderer who did not intend to kill, Enmund v. Florida,
458 U. S. 782 (1982) . In those opinions we acknowledged that “objective evidence, though of great importance, did not ‘wholly determine’ the controversy, ‘for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the
Eighth Amendment .’ ” Atkins, 536 U. S., at 312 (quoting Coker, 433 U. S., at 597 (plurality opinion)).
Justice White was exercising his own judgment in 1972 when he provided the decisive vote in Furman, the case that led to a nationwide reexamination of the death penalty. His conclusion that death amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment in the constitutional sense” as well as the “dictionary sense,” rested on both an uncontroversial legal premise and on a factual premise that he admittedly could not “prove” on the basis of objective criteria. 408 U. S., at 312, 313 (concurring opinion). As a matter of law, he correctly stated that the “needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes … would be patently excessive” and violative of the
Eighth Amendment . Id., at 312. As a matter of fact, he stated, “like my Brethren, I must arrive at judgment; and I can do no more than state a conclusion based on 10 years of almost daily exposure to the facts and circumstances of hundreds and hundreds of federal and state criminal cases involving crimes for which death is the authorized penalty.” Id., at 313. I agree with Justice White that there are occasions when a Member of this Court has a duty to make judgments on the basis of data that falls short of absolute proof.
Our decisions in 1976 upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty relied heavily on our belief that adequate procedures were in place that would avoid the danger of discriminatory application identified by Justice Douglas’ opinion in Furman, id., at 240–257 (concurring opinion), of arbitrary application identified by Justice Stewart, id., at 306 (same), and of excessiveness identified by Justices Brennan and Marshall. In subsequent years a number of our decisions relied on the premise that “death is different” from every other form of punishment to justify rules minimizing the risk of error in capital cases. See, e.g., Gardner v. Florida,
430 U. S. 349, 357–358 (1977) (plurality opinion). Ironically, however, more recent cases have endorsed procedures that provide less protections to capital defendants than to ordinary offenders.
Of special concern to me are rules that deprive the defendant of a trial by jurors representing a fair cross section of the community. Litigation involving both challenges for cause and peremptory challenges has persuaded me that the process of obtaining a “death qualified jury” is really a procedure that has the purpose and effect of obtaining a jury that is biased in favor of conviction. The prosecutorial concern that death verdicts would rarely be returned by 12 randomly selected jurors should be viewed as objective evidence supporting the conclusion that the penalty is excessive.
Another serious concern is that the risk of error in capital cases may be greater than in other cases because the facts are often so disturbing that the interest in making sure the crime does not go unpunished may overcome residual doubt concerning the identity of the offender. Our former emphasis on the importance of ensuring that decisions in death cases be adequately supported by reason rather than emotion, Gardner,
430 U. S. 349 , has been undercut by more recent decisions placing a thumb on the prosecutor’s side of the scales. Thus, in Kansas v. Marsh,
548 U. S. 163 (2006) , the Court upheld a state statute that requires imposition of the death penalty when the jury finds that the aggravating and mitigating factors are in equipoise. And in Payne v. Tennessee,
501 U. S. 808 (1991) , the Court overruled earlier cases and held that “victim impact” evidence relating to the personal characteristics of the victim and the emotional impact of the crime on the victim’s family is admissible despite the fact that it sheds no light on the question of guilt or innocence or on the moral culpability of the defendant, and thus serves no purpose other than to encourage jurors to make life or death decisions on the basis of emotion rather than reason.
A third significant concern is the risk of discriminatory application of the death penalty. While that risk has been dramatically reduced, the Court has allowed it to continue to play an unacceptable role in capital cases. Thus, in McCleskey v. Kemp,
481 U. S. 279 (1987) , the Court upheld a death sentence despite the “strong probability that [the defendant’s] sentencing jury … was influenced by the fact that [he was] black and his victim was white.” Id., at 366 (Stevens, J., dissenting); see also Evans v. State, 396 Md. 256, 323, 914 A. 2d 25, 64 (2006), cert. denied, 552 U. S. ___ (2007) (affirming a death sentence despite the existence of a study showing that “the death penalty is statistically more likely to be pursued against a black person who murders a white victim than against a defendant in any other racial combination”).
Finally, given the real risk of error in this class of cases, the irrevocable nature of the consequences is of decisive importance to me. Whether or not any innocent defendants have actually been executed, abundant evidence accumulated in recent years has resulted in the exoneration of an unacceptable number of defendants found guilty of capital offenses. See Garrett, Judging Innocence, 108 Colum. L. Rev. 55 (2008); Risinger, Innocents Convicted: An Empirically Justified Factual Wrongful Conviction Rate, 97J. Crim. L. & C. 761 (2007). The risk of executing innocent defendants can be entirely eliminated by treating any penalty more severe than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as constitutionally excessive.
In sum, just as Justice White ultimately based his conclusion in Furman on his extensive exposure to countless cases for which death is the authorized penalty, I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the
Eighth Amendment .” Furman, 408 U. S., at 312 (White, J., concurring).
IV
The conclusion that I have reached with regard to the constitutionality of the death penalty itself makes my decision in this case particularly difficult. It does not, however, justify a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law. This Court has held that the death penalty is constitutional, and has established a framework for evaluating the constitutionality of particular methods of execution. Under those precedents, whether as interpreted by The Chief Justice or Justice Ginsburg, I am persuaded that the evidence adduced by petitioners fails to prove that Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol violates the
Eighth Amendment . Accordingly, I join the Court’s judgment.
