Opinion ID: 1547368
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment

Text: Relying upon the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399, 106 S.Ct. 2595, 91 L.Ed.2d 335 (1986), Appellant asserts that the Eighth Amendment [12] provides grounds to suspend adversarial proceedings in a capital post conviction case during the period in which the prisoner's mental illness prevents him or her from comprehending the reasons for his or her sentence or its implications. She claims that forcing an incompetent prisoner to proceed through PCRA proceedings and toward his or her death is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. The ban on cruel and unusual punishment set forth by the Eighth Amendment prohibits a state from carrying out the sentence of death upon a prisoner who is insane. Ford, 477 U.S. at 409-10, 106 S.Ct. 2595; Jermyn, 652 A.2d at 822. The limit on a state's power to execute the insane is rooted in the questionable retributive value of executing a person who has no comprehension of why he or she has been stripped of the right to life and the natural abhorrence society feels at killing one who has no capacity to understand his or her own conscience or deity. Ford, 477 U.S. at 409-10, 106 S.Ct. 2595. Ford addresses only the imposition of the death penalty and does not examine any limitation on a state's power to require a next friend to proceed with the post conviction proceedings that he or she has initiated. In the present case, the Commonwealth is not inflicting cruel and unusual punishment upon Haag. The Commonwealth has yet to punish Haag by carrying out his death sentence. We conclude that the Eighth Amendment ban on executing the insane does not prohibit an incompetent individual from using a system of collateral review to challenge an allegedly fundamentally unfair conviction before the imposition of sentence. Consequently, Haag is not entitled to relief under the Eighth Amendment.