Opinion ID: 2449451
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment

Text: It must be conceded, of course, that at the time Article I, Section 16, of our state constitution was adopted in 1870 it was not considered to prohibit capital punishment. Capital punishment was employed before its adoption and has been employed since its adoption. But, as noted by the Supreme Court in Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 373, 30 S.Ct. 544, 551, 54 L.Ed. 793 (1910), a constitutional provision is enacted, it is true, from an experience of evils but its general language should not, therefore, be necessarily confined to the form that evil had theretofore taken. Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle, to be vital, must be capable of wider applications than the mischief which gave it birth. As noted by the Supreme Court of California in People v. Anderson, 6 Cal.3d 628, 100 Cal. Rptr. 152, 493 P.2d 880 (1972), cert. denied 406 U.S. 958, 92 S.Ct. 2060, 32 L.Ed.2d 344 (1972): The framers of our Constitution like those who drafted the Bill of Rights, anticipated that interpretation of the cruel and unusual punishments clause would not be static but that the clause would be applied consistently with the standards of the age in which the questioned punishment was sought to be inflicted. 493 P.2d at 893. See also Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101, 78 S.Ct. 590, 598, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958), in which the Supreme Court observed that the Eighth Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. Therefore, when the validity of the death penalty is drawn in question, judges cannot avoid the task of determining whether the death penalty continues to conform to the standards of the age. [2] If it falls below that standard, it is the duty of the court to declare it to be invalid. Ever since Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L.Ed. 60 (1803) that has been the way such questions have been decided in this country. The courts have no more authority to defer to the judgment of the legislature in determining what is a cruel and unusual punishment than to defer to that branch of government for a determination of what is due process of law or what is an unreasonable search and seizure. In each of these instances, the determination is a judicial one which, in our jurisprudence, resides with the courts and cannot be avoided. What considerations enter into a determination whether the death penalty does or does not comply with contemporary moral standards? Clearly, there is not unanimity of public opinion either favoring or opposing the death penalty. However, public opinion, although relevant, is not conclusive of the issue. If the judicial conclusion that a punishment is `cruel and unusual' `depend[ed] upon virtually unanimous condemnation of the penalty at issue,' then, `[l]ike no other constitutional provision, [the Clause's] only function would be to legitimize advances already made by the other departments and opinions already the conventional wisdom.' We know that the Framers did not envision `so narrow a role for this basic guaranty of human rights.' Furman v. Georgia, supra, 408 U.S. at 268, 92 S.Ct. at 2741 (1972) (Brennan, J., concurring), quoting from Goldberg & Dershowitz, Declaring the Death Penalty Unconstitutional, 83 Harv.L.Rev. 1773, 1782 (1970). The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has correctly pointed out ... that what our society does in actuality is a much more compelling indicator of the acceptability of the death penalty than the responses citizens may give upon questioning. Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1282. The last person executed in Tennessee was William Tines, on November 7, 1960. There was one execution in 1959 (Thomas Rutledge). There were none in 1958, two in 1957, and none in 1956. There were four in 1955. There were none in 1954, 1953, 1952, or 1951. No executions were carried out in the four recent administrations of Governor Frank Clement, Governor Buford Ellington, Governor Winfield Dunn and Governor Ray Blanton. Reciting a lack of executions in Massachusetts since 1948, Chief Justice Hennessey of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in District Attorney for the Suffolk District v. Watson, supra, made this statement: The complete absence of executions in the Commonwealth through these many years indicates that in the opinion of those several Governors and others who bore the responsibility for administering the death penalty provisions and who had the most immediate appreciation of the death sentence, it was unacceptable. Id. 411 N.E.2d at 1282. The above recited experience in Tennessee leads me to a similar conclusion. I now point out certain aspects of the death penalty which, in my view, render it cruel and unusual.
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]).
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).
Finally, the death penalty is absolutely unnecessary as a punishment and, therefore, is cruel. [4] Society would be adequately protected from the condemned murderer by his permanent imprisonment; killing him is not necessary. Our law recognizes only one instance in which a deliberate killing is justified, viz., one may kill another in his own or another's necessary self-defense. This being true, how can the whole body of individuals making up The State be justified in killing a person when it is unnecessary to do so for the protection of the people of the state? See Capital Punishment, 56 T. Sellin (1967 edition). By any modern concept of the term cruel, the deliberate and unnecessary killing of a human being is cruel, whether done by an individual or by the State. In society where the force of all is mobilized against one, what principle of justice authorizes it to impose death? ... A victor who would kill his captured enemies is called barbaric! A man who butchers a child whom he can disarm and punish seems like a monster! An accused condemned by society is like a conquered and powerless enemy; he is weaker before it than a child is before a man. Robespierre (quoted in Hornum, Two Debates: France, 1791; England, 1956, in Capital Punishment 65-66 [T. Sellin ed. 1967]). With respect to the question whether the death penalty is necessary, the Supreme Court of California, in holding that its death penalty statute violated the cruel or unusual punishments clause of its state constitution, said in People v. Anderson, supra : The People concede that capital punishment is cruel to the individual involved. They argue, however, that only `unnecessary' cruelty is constitutionally proscribed, and that if a cruel punishment can be justified it is not forbidden by article I, section 6, of the California Constitution. We need not decide here whether our Constitution permits the infliction of `necessary' cruelty as punishment for crime, because respondent has not demonstrated that the death penalty can be justified as necessary to any state interest. In seeking to justify continuance of capital punishment, the People argue that it furthers three of the four acknowledged purposes of punishment. Respondent concedes that death is in no way rehabilitative, but contends that capital punishment may be legitimately imposed in retribution for serious offenses, that it serves to isolate the offender, and that the existence of the death penalty acts as a deterrent to crime. None of these purposes is shown to justify so onerous a penalty as death. Although vengeance or retribution has been acknowledged as a permissible purpose of punishment under the Eighth Amendment ( Williams v. New York (1949) 337 U.S. 241, 248, 69 S.Ct. 1079 [1083], 93 L.Ed. 1337), we do not sanction punishment solely for retribution in California. ( In Re Estrada (1965) 63 Cal.2d 740, 745, 48 Cal. Rptr. 172, 408 P.2d 948.) We are fully aware that many condemned prisoners have committed crimes of the utmost cruelty and depravity and that such persons are not entitled to the slightest sympathy from society in the administration of justice or otherwise. Nevertheless, it is incompatible with the dignity of an enlightened society to attempt to justify the taking of life for purposes of vengeance. Admittedly, isolation of the offender from society is a proper and often necessary goal of punishment and death does effectively serve that purpose. Society can be protected from convicted criminals, however, by far less onerous means than execution. In no sense can capital punishment be justified as `necessary' to isolate the offender from society. 100 Cal. Rptr. at 167-68, 493 P.2d at 895-96. I find that I am in agreement with the views thus expressed by the California Supreme Court. Life imprisonment without parole is an alternative that serves the functions of severely punishing the criminal and permanently protecting the society from the possibility of a repeated offense. Some writers have attempted to justify the death penalty on the grounds that society needs to kill some criminals in order to deter others from potential crimes. After a century of debate, investigators and scholars are in disagreement, at best, about whether the death penalty in fact does deter crime; indeed, some argue that it has the opposite effect. To prove that the death penalty, in particular, is a deterrent would require more than proof that the possibility of punishment, in general, deters crime. The proof would have to show that there are potential crimes that are not committed because of the existence of the death penalty and that they would be committed otherwise. Such an inquiry, by its nature, would be highly speculative. In any event, my view is that, for the reasons discussed herein, the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment for the person upon whom it is inflicted and is, therefore, unconstitutional. Were it positively shown that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on others, it would still be unconstitutional because it is a cruel and unusual punishment for the person upon whom it is inflicted. In other words, deterrence, or the lack thereof, is irrelevant to the constitutional issue whether a particular punishment is cruel and unusual. Deterrent effect cannot save a cruel and unusual punishment.
I am convinced that it is inevitable that the death penalty will be applied capriciously and arbitrarily. [5] Again, I quote approvingly from the opinion of the Massachusetts court in Watson : We know that, each year during the decades of the 1930s through the 1960s, thousands of persons were convicted of criminal homicides in states where death was an authorized punishment for those crimes. However, death was inflicted in only a minute fraction of those cases. `When a country of over 200 million people inflicts an unusually severe punishment no more than fifty times a year, the inference is strong that the punishment is not regularly and fairly applied. To dispel it would indeed require a clear showing of nonarbitrary infliction.' Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 293 [92 S.Ct. 2726, 2754, 33 L.Ed.2d 346] (1972) (Brennan, J., concurring). No rational basis can be offered to explain why the few were executed and many others were not. It cannot be said that only the `worst' offenders were executed. All murderers are extreme offenders. Fine distinctions, designed to select a very few from the many, are inescapably capricious when applied to murders and murderers. As a consequence, the death penalty is `wantonly and . .. freakishly' inflicted. Furman v. Georgia, supra, at 310 [92 S.Ct. at 2763] (Stewart, J., concurring). Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1283-84. I also agree with the Massachusetts court that while unguided jury discretion is intolerable, statutory guidelines cannot cure that uncertainty entirely; the subtle distinctions in the elements of crimes can be virtually impossible to define with certainty. As Mr. Justice Harlan wrote in McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 204, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 1465, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971): `Those who have come to grips with the hard task of actually attempting to draft means of channeling capital sentencing discretion have confirmed the lesson taught by ... history. .. . To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death penalty, and to express these characteristics in language which can be fairly understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability.' A basic criterion, for example, in `channeling' the death penalty decision lies in the choice between first and second degree murder. Mr. Justice Cardozo said of the distinction between degrees of murder, that it is `so obscure that no jury hearing it for the first time can fairly be expected to assimilate and understand it. I am not at all sure that I understand it myself after trying to apply it for many years and after diligent study of what has been written in the books. Upon the basis of this fine distinction with its obscure and mystifying psychology, scores of men have gone to their death.' Cardozo, What Medicine Can Do For Law, in Law & Literature 100-101 (1931). Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1284. I think the Massachusetts court is correct in its conclusion that even if guidelines could cure the arbitrariness in the jury's determination of the crime and the sentence, the death penalty still would be arbitrarily inflicted because of the unguided, discretionary powers exercised by others in the judicial process: Power to decide rests not only in juries but in police officers, prosecutors, defense counsel, and trial judges. (Footnote omitted.) [6] In the totality of the process, most life or death decisions will be made by these officials, unguided and uncurbed by statutory standards. In any given case, decisions rest upon such considerations as the level of public outcry.  Furman stands indifferent to the exercise of the prosecutor's `untrammeled discretion.' For reasons which may be valid in the context of his duties, but which do not assist evenhandedness, the prosecutor in a homicide case may forego a first degree murder indictment and seek an indictment for second degree murder or a lesser charge. Also, in a first degree murder case, perhaps pursuant to plea bargaining, the prosecutor may in his uncurbed discretion nol prosse that part of the indictment which charges murder in the first degree. Similarly, the judge may dismiss the first degree murder charge, in his sole discretion, pursuant to accepting a plea of guilty to a lesser offense. [7] We do not think that our comments denigrate the general administration of criminal justice, or the good will of those who administer the system. It can be said that these officials must necessarily have these discretionary powers in the exercise of most of their functions. Nevertheless, the criminal justice system allows chance and caprice to continue to influence sentencing, and we are here dealing with the decisions as to who shall live and who shall die. With regard to the death penalty, such chance and caprice are unconstitutional under art. 26... . Watson, supra, 411 N.E.2d at 1285 (footnote omitted). We have a response to those who might argue that our comments as to arbitrariness and discrimination apply as well to all punishments, not merely to the death penalty. While other forms of punishment may also be arbitrary in some measure, the death penalty requires special scrutiny for constitutionality. `The penalty of death differs from all other forms of criminal punishment, not in degree but in kind.' Furman, supra, 408 U.S. at 306, 92 S.Ct. at 2760. (Stewart, J., concurring). Accord, Commonwealth v. O'Neal, 369 Mass. 242, 249, 339 N.E.2d 676 (Tauro, C.J., concurring). `[T]he penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two.' Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 305, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 2991, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976). Our society's failure to bring evenhandedness to the entire spectrum of criminal punishment calls for great and persistent effort toward improvement. However, we are not required to abandon all such punishments on constitutional grounds. At the same time, the supreme punishment of death, inflicted as it is by chance and caprice, may not stand. Id. 411 N.E.2d at 1286. See also Furman v. Georgia, supra, 408 U.S. at 286-300 and 287 n. 34, 92 S.Ct. at 2750-2757 and 2751 n. 34 (Brennan, J., concurring); Lockett v. Ohio, supra, 438 U.S. at 604-05, 98 S.Ct. at 2964-65 (opinion of Burger, C.J.). I would apply the foregoing reasoning to the Tennessee death penalty statute and hold that is is a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by Article I, Section 16, of the Tennessee Constitution because, inevitably, it is arbitrarily and capriciously imposed. [8]