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

Heading: Finality of the penalty.

Text: The utter finality of the death penalty may cruelly frustrate the cause of justice. Once the prisoner has been put to death by the state there can be no relief granted although later developments in the evidence of the case or of the controlling law may show, conclusively, that the penalty was mistakenly inflicted. [3] Again, I quote from the opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the Watson case: The `irreversible finality of the execution of a criminal defendant,' [ Commonwealth v. O'Neal, 369 Mass. 242, 276 n. 1, 339 N.E.2d 676, 695 n. 1 (1975)] (Wilkins, J., concurring), could frustrate such efforts to see that justice is applied equally when changes in the law occur or when new evidence is discovered. While this court has the power to correct constitutional or other errors retroactively by ordering new trials for capital defendants whose appeals are pending or who have been fortunate enough to obtain stays of execution or commutations, it cannot, or course, raise the dead. Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1282. The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity. The contrast with the plight of a person punished by imprisonment is evident. An individual in prison does not lose `the right to have rights.' A prisoner retains, for example, the constitutional rights to the free exercise of religion, to be free of cruel and unusual punishments, and to treatment as a `person' for purposes of due process of law and the equal protection of the laws. Furman v. Georgia, supra, 408 U.S. at 290, 92 S.Ct. at 2752 (1972) (Brennan, J., concurring). I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me. Thomas Jefferson (quoted in E. Block, And May God Have Mercy ... 1 [1962]).