Instead, those sentenced to death will be warehoused on death row for the rest of their lives in an overcrowded and dilapidated facility, with none of the rehabilitative services or other programs afforded the non-condemned. The psychological toll of being confined on death row for long periods of time has become so prevalent that it is commonly referred to as the “death row phenomenon.”
Justice White noted in Furman that where the “penalty is so infrequently imposed that the threat of execution is too attenuated to be of substantial service to criminal justice” it is unconstitutional. As he stated, when the death penalty “ceases realistically to further [the social ends it was deemed to serve] . . . its imposition would then be 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 would be patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”
We have far surpassed this point in California.
Article comments
1 - Glenn Contrarian
I used to support the death penalty. That was, until I realized that yes, there ARE innocent men who are sentenced to death in our judicial system.
2 - rosomalley
Excellent analysis of the inherent flaws in applying the death penalty. A former criminal defense attorney myself, I would add one other - one most people don't seem to realize. The criminal justice system heavily favors the prosecution. By this, I mean that prosecutors have access to extraordinary resources - genetics labs, databases, crime scene investigators and techniques and lots of manpower to investigate cases through the police departments, to name but a few. Unless he or she was wealthy, a defendant usually had little access to or ability to pay for such resources. And although a defendant had some access to prosecution materials through the discovery process, these materials were a poor substitute for a defense conducted investigation, subject as they were to prosecutorial bias and the prosecution's need to "close" a case, not necessarily solve it. Under these circumstances, application of the death penalty does seem "cruel and unusual".
3 - Dr Dreadful
I agree with the above commenter: this is an excellent, clearly argued article.
It is right and proper that a person sentenced to death should have every opportunity to challenge their sentence - there is, after all, no going back after the punishment is carried out if it later turns out the conviction was wrongful. At the same time, it's also outrageously cruel, not only to the prisoner but also to the victim's family and friends, to keep the person incarcerated for decades while the lawyers muck about doing goodness knows what.
Not to mention that the longer the appeals process goes on, the older and less reliable the evidence gets, until it reaches the point where neither an upholding nor an overturning of the conviction is likely to be all that sound.
If we must have a death penalty, as the majority of people seem to be bloodthirsty enough to believe, then it behoves us to make capital cases an absolute priority at all levels and stages of the justice system.
4 - C Bernstien
The very acronym for the "SAFE" Act, California's latest effort to abolish the death penalty, is bogus. The costs claimed by SAFE are exaggerated and the costs of the "SAFE" Act's life imprisonment would be much more expensive due to life-time medical costs, the increased security required to coerce former death-row inmates to work, etc. The amount "saved" in order to help fund law enforcement is negligible and only for a short period of time. (It is nothing more than a bribe in a vain effort to obtain conservative votes.) Bottom line, the "SAFE" Act is another attempt by those who are responsible for the high costs and lack of executions to now persuade voters to abandon it. Obviously, the arguments of the proponents of the SAFE Act would disappear if the death penalty was carried forth in accordance with the law.
5 - Christopher Rose
It is absurd to believe that killing people is wrong and therefore a crime that should be punished by killing people. Doh!
Furthermore, look at the countries that practice capital punishment: Belarus; China; Cuba; Egypt; India; Iran; Iraq; Japan; Malaysia; Mongolia; North Korea; Pakistan; Saudi Arabia; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan; Tonga; United States; Vietnam. Hardly the world's most progressive nations...