Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, Who Came to Oppose the Death Penalty, Dies at 99

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who described his decid­ing vote to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1976 as the one court vote he most regret­ted, has died. He was 99 years old. A media advi­so­ry released by the Supreme Court on July 16, 2019, said that Stevens died of com­pli­ca­tions from a stroke he suf­fered the day before. ​“He brought to our bench an inim­itable blend of kind­ness, humil­i­ty, wis­dom, and inde­pen­dence,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in the media advi­so­ry. ​“His unre­lent­ing com­mit­ment to jus­tice has left us a better nation.”

Appointed in 1975 by Republican President Gerald R. Ford, Stevens was a clas­sic judi­cial con­ser­v­a­tive whom court watch­ers lat­er regard­ed as a lead­ing pro­gres­sive voice on the Court. After his retire­ment from the bench in 2010, he repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that his approach to cas­es had not changed dur­ing his three-decades tenure on the Court and that he had not become a lib­er­al. Rather, he said, the Court had moved to the political right. 

Shortly after Justice Stevens’ appoint­ment, the Court accept­ed for review five cas­es that chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty itself and the var­i­ous cap­i­tal-sen­tenc­ing schemes states adopt­ed in response to the Court’s 1972 deci­sion that struck down all exist­ing death-penal­ty statutes. Justice Stevens vot­ed in the major­i­ty in all five cas­es, pro­vid­ing a fifth vote uphold­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty in Gregg v. Georgia and of Georgia’s, Florida’s, and Texas’s death-penal­ty statutes and vot­ing with the major­i­ty in declar­ing North Carolina’s and Louisiana’s manda­to­ry death sen­tenc­ing statutes unconstitutional. 

In Gregg, Stevens wrote that “[t]he deci­sion that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment may be the appro­pri­ate sanc­tion in extreme cas­es is an expres­sion of the community’s belief that cer­tain crimes are them­selves so griev­ous an affront to human­i­ty that the only ade­quate response may be the penal­ty of death.” Yet while sup­port­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, he con­sis­tent­ly vot­ed to lim­it its use, vot­ing in 1988 to bar its appli­ca­tion to offend­ers aged 15 or younger and cast­ing one of the five votes in 2005 to extend that pro­scrip­tion through age 17. In 2002, he wrote the opin­ion for the Court declar­ing that the use of the death penal­ty against per­sons with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty con­sti­tut­ed cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. By 2008, after three decades of expo­sure to cap­i­tal cas­es, Justice Stevens had con­clud­ed ​“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,” he wrote, is ​“patent­ly exces­sive and cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment viola­tive of the Eighth Amendment.”

In the Fall of 2010, fol­low­ing his retire­ment from the Court, Justice Stevens expressed regret for his vote to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty and of the Texas death-penal­ty statute. He explained the evo­lu­tion of his views in inter­views with ABC News and NPR. ​“I thought at the time … that if the uni­verse of defen­dants eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty is suf­fi­cient­ly nar­row so that you can be con­fi­dent that the defen­dant real­ly mer­its that severe pun­ish­ment, that the death penal­ty was appro­pri­ate.” However, he said, over the years, ​“the Court con­stant­ly expand­ed the cas­es eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty, so that the under­ly­ing premise for my vote has dis­ap­peared, in a sense.” Those deci­sions, he said, made death penal­ty pro­ce­dures more sym­pa­thet­ic to pros­e­cu­tors: ​“I real­ly think that the death penal­ty today is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from the death penal­ty that we thought we were authorizing.”

Speaking at a cap­i­tal case sem­i­nar in California in February 2016, Justice Stevens called the death penal­ty ​“a waste­ful use of resources with no demon­strat­ed ben­e­fit to soci­ety. Taxpayers,” he said, ​“should ter­mi­nate this waste as expe­di­tious­ly as pos­si­ble.” With the avail­abil­i­ty of life with­out parole as an alter­na­tive, he said ​“the deter­rence val­ue of the penal­ty has dimin­ished almost to zero.” Stevens cit­ed the exe­cu­tion of Texas death-row pris­on­er Carlos Deluna, ​“a man who was unques­tion­ably inno­cent of mur­der,” as an exam­ple of the ​“ever-present poten­tial for mis­take. … [I]t is time to put an end to irrev­o­ca­ble and mis­tak­en state action of that kind,” he said.