Opinion ID: 2449451
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Infliction of Pain Upon The Prisoner.

Text: The death penalty is now unique in its designed infliction of both mental and physical pain upon the prisoner. This was pointed out by Mr. Justice Brennan in Furman v. Georgia, supra, at 287-88, 92 S.Ct. at 2751, as follows: Since the discontinuance of flogging as a constitutionally permissible punishment, Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571 (CA 8 1968), death remains as the only punishment that may involve the conscious infliction of physical pain. In addition, we know that mental pain is an inseparable part of our practice of punishing criminals by death, for the prospect of pending execution exacts a frightful toll during the inevitable long wait between the imposition of sentence and the actual infliction of death. See also, People v. Anderson, supra, 6 Cal.3d at 649, 100 Cal. Rptr. 152, 493 P.2d 880. The barbarous nature of the death penalty and especially of the mental cruelty which it inflicts upon the prisoner has been vividly expressed by Justice Liacos of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, as follows: The imposition of the death penalty is disguised by the language and technique of abstraction. `Indeed no one dares speak directly of the ceremony. Officials and journalists who have to talk about it, as if they were aware of both its provocative and its shameful aspects, have made up a sort of ritual language, reduced to stereotyped phrases. Hence we read at breakfast time in a corner of the newspaper that the condemned has paid his debt to society or that he has atoned or that at five a.m. justice was done.' A. Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 132 (1960). Consistent with the views of Camus, of authorities cited elsewhere in this opinion and of the majority, are the experiences described by Henry Arsenault, a convicted murderer sentenced to death in this Commonwealth. See Arsenault v. Commonwealth, 353 Mass. 575 [233 N.W.2d 730], rev'd 393 U.S. 5 [89 S.Ct. 35, 21 L.Ed.2d 5] (1968). See also, Commonwealth v. Devlin, 335 Mass. 555 [141 N.E.2d 269] (1957). Arsenault is presently an inmate at the Massachusetts correctional Institution at Norfolk and has submitted a brief pro se as amicus curiae. His brief tells his story. For over two years, Henry Arsenault `lived on death row feeling as if the Court's sentence were slowly being carried out.' Arsenault could not stop thinking about death. Despite several stays, he never believed he could escape execution. `There was a day to day choking, tremulous fear that quickly became suffocating.' If he slept at all, fear of death snapped him awake sweating. His throat was clenched so tight he often could not eat. His belly cramped, and he could not move his bowels. He urinated uncontrollably. He could not keep still. And all the while a guard watched him, so he would not commit suicide. The guard was there when he had his nightmares and there when he wet his pants. Arsenault retained neither privacy nor dignity. Apart from the guards he was alone much of the time as the day of his execution neared. And on the day of the execution, after three sleepless weeks and five days' inability to eat, after a night's pacing the cell, he heard the warden explain the policy of the Commonwealth  no visitors, no special last meal, and no medication. Arsenault asked the warden to let him walk to the execution on his own. The time came. He walked to the death chamber and turned toward the chair. Stopping him, the warden explained that the execution would not be for over an hour. Arsenault sat on the other side of the room as the witnesses filed in behind the one-way mirror. When the executioner tested the chair, the lights dimmed. Arsenault heard other prisoners scream. After the chaplain gave him last rites, Arsenault heard the door slam shut and the noise echoing, the clock ticking. He wet his pants. Less than half an hour before the execution, the Lieutenant Governor commuted his sentence. Arsenault's legs would not hold him up. Guards carried him back to his cell. He was trembling uncontrollably. A doctor sedated him. And he was moved off death row. ... The raw terror and unabating stress that Henry Arsenault experienced was torture; torture in the guise of civilized business in an advanced and humane polity. This torture was not unique, but merely one degrading instance in a legacy of degradation. The ordeals of the condemned are inherent and inevitable in any system that informs the condemned person of his sentence and provides for a gap between sentence and execution. Whatever one believes about the cruelty of the death penalty itself, this violence done the prisoner's mind must afflict the conscience of enlightened government and give the civilized heart no rest. Death is the `king of terrors.' Job 18:14... . So deep is the fear of death and the corresponding desire for transcendence that Christian thought attributes death to the fall of Adam, and the New Testament proclaims Christ's victory over death. 1 Corinthians 15:20, 26.       The condemned must confront this primal terror directly, and in the most demeaning circumstances. A condemned man knows, subject to the possibility of successful appeal or commutation, the time and manner of his death. His thoughts about death must necessarily be focused more precisely than other people's. He must wait for a specific death, not merely expect death in the abstract. Apart from cases of suicide or terminal illness, this certainty is unique to those who are sentenced to death. The State puts the question of death to the condemned person, and he must grapple with it without the consolation that he will die naturally or with his humanity intact. A condemned person experiences an extreme form of debasement. Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1289-92 (Liacos, J., concurring) (footnotes omitted). In a footnote, Justice Liacos further states, My argument that the ordeal imposed on the condemned is cruel and unusual punishment does not depend on the existence of lengthy delays between sentence and execution. Two months  or, for that matter, one day  of torture offends the Constitution. As C. Duffy, a former warden of California's prison at San Quentin has described, `One night on death row is too long, and the length of time spent there by [some inmates] constitutes cruelty that defies the imagination. It has always been a source of wonder to me that they didn't all go stark, raving mad.' C. Duffy & A. Hirshberg, 88 Men and 2 Women, 254 (1962). Id. at 1291, n. 5 (Liacos, J., concurring).