A recent arti­cle in the Brooklyn Law Review argues that exe­cut­ing long-serv­ing, elder­ly death row inmates should be deemed uncon­sti­tu­tion­al as cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. In A Modest Proposal: The Aged of Death Row Should Be Deemed Too Old to Execute, Professor Elizabeth Rapaport (pic­tured) of the University of New Mexico School of Law main­tains that harsh death row con­di­tions, along with the fragili­ty of the grow­ing num­ber of elder­ly inmates due to the aging process, result in excess suf­fer­ing that should ren­der their exe­cu­tion a vio­la­tion of the Eighth Amendment. Rapaport states, ​“The long delays between pro­nounce­ment of sen­tence and exe­cu­tion, and the con­sid­er­able uncer­tain­ty about whether any con­demned man or woman will be exe­cut­ed in our sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, have giv­en rise to a new form of cru­el­ty unknown to our ances­tors. Delay is not aber­rant but nor­mal. It can­not be purged from the sys­tem with­out doing unac­cept­able vio­lence to con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly man­dat­ed due process.”

(E. Rapaport, ​“A Modest Proposal: The Aged of Death Row Should Be Deemed Too Old to Execute,” 77 Brooklyn Law Review 1089 (2012)). See Time on Death Row. Read more law review arti­cles. Listen to DPIC’s pod­cast on Death Row Conditions.

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