Court Opinion

ID: 9429385
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:26:33.805704+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:16.810293
License: Public Domain

The Chief Justice,
concurring.
On August 23, 1983, the applicant, Jimmy Lee Gray, filed a third petition for certiorari and an application for a stay of execution addressed to Justice White. Justice White denied petitioner’s application for a stay on August 25, 1983, and the following day, the Mississippi Supreme Court set petitioner’s execution for September 2, 1983. Now before the Court is petitioner’s petition for certiorari and his reapplication for a stay of execution addressed to Justice Brennan, and referred to the Court.
The facts and procedural history have not been referred to in the dissent. Since they are critical, they are set forth as *1238follows: (1) In October 1976, petitioner was indicted for capital murder. At trial, the State proved that on June 25, 1976, petitioner abducted a 3-year-old girl, carried her to a remote area, and after sexually molesting her, suffocated her in a muddy ditch and threw her body into a stream. Petitioner was convicted and sentenced to death. (2) On appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the conviction and remanded the case for a new trial. Gray v. State, 351 So. 2d 1342 (1977). (3) On retrial in 1978, Gray was again convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. (4) The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed both the conviction and the death sentence. Gray v. State, 375 So. 2d 994 (1979). (5) We denied petitioner’s petitions for certiorari and rehearing. Gray v. Mississippi, 446 U. S. 988, rehearing denied, 448 U. S. 912 (1980).
(6) Petitioner filed his first applications for a writ of error coram nobis and stay of execution before the Mississippi Supreme Court in July 1980. (7) After the state court’s summary denial of the writ, petitioner filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The court conducted an evidentiary hearing with respect to several of Gray’s 22 claims of constitutional violation and denied relief. (8) The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed and denied petitioner’s motion for rehearing. Gray v. Lucas, 677 F. 2d 1086, rehearing denied, 685 F. 2d 139 (1982). (9) A petition for cer-tiorari and rehearing were once again denied by this Court. 461 U. S. 910 (1983); 462 U. S. 1124 (1983). On May 11, 1983, the Mississippi Supreme Court set the execution date for July 6, 1983.
(10) On June 22, 1983 petitioner submitted to the Mississippi Supreme Court a second motion for stay of execution along with a new application for a writ of error coram nobis. The petition raised, among others, those claims now before this Court. The Mississippi Supreme Court denied all re*1239quested relief on June 29, 1983. (11) Petitioner thereupon filed his second petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Federal District Court, reasserting those claims he had submitted to the Mississippi Supreme Court. (12) On July 2, 1983, the Court of Appeals granted petitioner’s application for a stay of execution. (13) The District Court dismissed the petition for habeas corpus on July 8, 1983. (14) The Court of Appeals affirmed, Gray v. Lucas, 710 F. 2d 1048 (1983), and denied petitioner’s petition for rehearing. The stay was dissolved on August 26, 1983.
This case has been in state and federal courts for seven years. It has been tried twice in the state court and reviewed by the Mississippi Supreme Court four times. Seventeen different federal judges have reviewed petitioner’s case, and this Court has previously acted on this case four times prior to Justice White’s denial of petitioner’s application for a stay last week. Over the past seven years, judicial action reviewing this case has been taken 82 times by 26 different state and federal judges.
Petitioner’s latest claims have been reviewed by several courts in both the state and federal systems. Petitioner’s principal claim, which Justice Marshall addresses in his dissent, is that the lethal gas method of execution constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In my view, no evidentiary hearing on the effects of lethal gas is required. A number of affidavits describing such effects were filed with and considered by the Court of Appeals, and the contents of several of these have been set forth in the dissent today of Justice Marshall. For purposes of my vote in this case, I accept the truth of the affidavits submitted by the petitioner, but nevertheless conclude — as did the Court of Appeals — that they do not as a matter of law establish an Eighth Amendment violation. I agree with the Court of Appeals that the showing made by petitioner does not justify a court holding that, “as a *1240matter of law or fact, the pain and terror resulting from death by cyanide is so different in degree or nature from that resulting from other traditional modes of execution as to implicate the eighth amendment right.” Gray v. Lucas, 710 F. 2d, at 1061.
This case illustrates a recent pattern of calculated efforts to frustrate valid judgments after painstaking judicial review over a number of years; at some point there must be finality. I join the Court’s action denying the petition for certiorari and denying a stay of execution.