Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 59

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

9 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

now have plausible evidence of unreliability that (perhaps
due  to  DNA  evidence)  is  stronger  than  the  evidence  we 
had  before.    In  sum,  there  is  significantly  more  research-
based  evidence  today  indicating  that  courts  sentence  to 
death  individuals  who  may  well  be  actually  innocent  or
whose  convictions  (in  the  law’s  view)  do  not  warrant  the 
death penalty’s application. 

II 
“Cruel”—Arbitrariness 
The arbitrary imposition of punishment is the antithesis
of the rule of law.  For that reason, Justice Potter Stewart 
(who supplied critical votes for the holdings in Furman v. 
Georgia,  408  U. S.  238  (1972)  (per  curiam),  and  Gregg)
found the death penalty unconstitutional as administered 
in 1972: 

“These  death  sentences  are  cruel  and  unusual  in  the 
same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and 
unusual.  For,  of  all  the  people  convicted  of  [death­
eligible  crimes],  many  just  as  reprehensible  as  these,
the[se]  petitioners  are  among  a  capriciously  selected
random handful upon which the sentence of death has 
in fact been imposed.”  Furman, 408 U. S., at 309–310 
(concurring opinion). 

See  also  id.,  at  310  (“[T]he  Eighth  and  Fourteenth
Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of 
death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty 
to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed”); id., at 313 
(White,  J.,  concurring)  (“[T]he  death  penalty  is  exacted 
with great infrequency even for the most atrocious crimes 
and . . . there is no meaningful basis for distinguishing the
few  cases  in  which  it  is  imposed  from  the  many  cases  in
which it is not”).

When  the  death  penalty  was  reinstated  in  1976,  this 
Court acknowledged that the death penalty is (and would