For some Supreme Court Justices and inter­na­tion­al courts, the exten­sive time that many inmates spend on U.S. death rows has raised con­cerns about cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. In a recent dis­sent regard­ing the exe­cu­tion of Manuel Valle in Florida, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that Valle should not be exe­cut­ed because the 33 years he already spent on death row amount­ed to a vio­la­tion of the Eighth Amendment. In an ear­li­er dis­sent in 1999, Justice Breyer not­ed that the Constitution did not fore­see such delays, Our Constitution was writ­ten at a time when delay between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion could be mea­sured in days or weeks, not decades.” Justice Breyer’s con­cerns are in line with lead­ing inter­na­tion­al legal opin­ion regard­ing the debil­i­tat­ing iso­la­tion com­mon to death row. Foreign courts have ruled that liv­ing for decades while fac­ing exe­cu­tion is a form of psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ment. Sarah H. Cleveland, a Columbia law pro­fes­sor and for­mer State Department offi­cial, said, Although con­cerns about the human impact of exces­sive time spent on death row have received lit­tle atten­tion in this coun­try, the death row phe­nom­e­non’ — includ­ing lengthy time on death row — has been rec­og­nized as inhu­man pun­ish­ment and ille­gal through­out Europe since the 1980s.” In a 1993 opin­ion, the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council wrote, There is an instinc­tive revul­sion against the prospect of hang­ing a man after he has been held under sen­tence of death for many years.” Justice Breyer con­clud­ed that a death penal­ty sys­tem that can­not be admin­is­tered with­out long delays points to the dif­fi­cul­ty of rec­on­cil­ing the impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty as cur­rent­ly admin­is­tered with pro­ce­dures nec­es­sary to assure that the wrong per­son is not exe­cut­ed.” While on the Court, Justice John Paul Stevens also expressed con­cerns about the cru­el­ty of extend­ed time on death row. 

(A. Liptak, Lifelong Death Sentences,” New York Times, October 31, 2011). See Time on Death Row, U.S. Supreme Court, and International.

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