Excerpts from Supreme Court Opinions

Justice Stevens’s opin­ion about the death penal­ty evolved while he was on the Court. Excepts from Supreme Court opinions:

“The 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.”

— Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Justice Stevens concurring

“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.”

— Stanford v. Kentucky (1989), Justice Stevens dissenting

“Perhaps even more impor­tant than our spe­cif­ic hold­ing today is our reaf­fir­ma­tion of the basic prin­ci­ple that informs the Court’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the Eighth Amendment. If the mean­ing of that Amendment had been frozen when it was orig­i­nal­ly draft­ed, it would impose no imped­i­ment to the exe­cu­tion of 7‑year-old children today.”

— Roper v. Simmons (2005), Justice Stevens concurring

“[O]ur expe­ri­ence dur­ing the past three decades has demon­strat­ed that delays in state-spon­sored killings are inescapable and that exe­cut­ing defen­dants after such delays is unac­cept­ably cru­el. This inevitable cru­el­ty, cou­pled with the dimin­ished jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for car­ry­ing out an exe­cu­tion after the lapse of so much time, rein­forces my opin­ion that con­tem­po­rary deci­sions ​‘to retain the death penal­ty as a part of our law are the prod­uct of habit and inat­ten­tion rather than an accept­able delib­er­a­tive process.’ ” (quot­ing Baze v. Rees).

— Thompson v. McNeil (2009), Justice Stevens concurring

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. 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, … 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.” (quot­ing Furman v. Georgia).

— Baze v. Rees (2008), Justice Stevens concurring