Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 36.0

Cite as:  576 U. S. ____ (2015) 

3 

SCALIA, J., concurring 

commission.  Post, at 6.  JUSTICE BREYER acknowledges as 
much: “[T]he crimes at issue in capital cases are typically
horrendous  murders,  and  thus  accompanied  by  intense 
community  pressure.”    Ibid.   That  same  pressure  would 
exist, and the same risk of wrongful convictions, if horren-
dous  death-penalty  cases  were  converted  into  equally 
horrendous  life-without-parole  cases.  The  reality  is  that
any innocent defendant is infinitely better off appealing a 
death  sentence  than  a  sentence  of  life  imprisonment.
(Which,  again,  JUSTICE  BREYER  acknowledges:  “[C]ourts 
(or  State  Governors)  are  130  times  more  likely  to  exoner-
ate a defendant where a death sentence is at issue,” post, 
at  5.)  The  capital  convict  will  obtain  endless  legal  assis-
tance  from  the  abolition  lobby  (and  legal  favoritism  from
abolitionist  judges),  while  the  lifer  languishes  unnoticed 
behind bars. 

JUSTICE  BREYER  next  says  that  the  death  penalty  is
cruel because it is arbitrary.  To prove this point, he points
to a study of 205 cases that “measured the ‘egregiousness’ 
of the murderer’s conduct” with “a system of metrics,” and 
then  “compared  the  egregiousness  of  the  conduct  of  the  9 
defendants  sentenced  to  death  with  the  egregiousness  of 
the conduct of defendants in the remaining 196 cases [who 
were  not  sentenced  to  death],”  post,  at  10–11. 
If  only 
Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume knew that moral philosophy 
could  be  so  neatly  distilled  into  a  pocket-sized,  vade  me-
cum  “system  of  metrics.”    Of  course  it  cannot:  Egregious-
ness is a moral judgment susceptible of few hard-and-fast
rules.  More  importantly,  egregiousness  of  the  crime  is 
only one of several factors that render a punishment con-
dign—culpability,  rehabilitative  potential,  and  the  need 
for  deterrence  also  are  relevant.    That  is  why  this  Court 
has  required  an  individualized  consideration  of  all  miti-
gating circumstances, rather than formulaic application of 
some egregiousness test. 

It is because these questions are contextual and admit of