Against the Death Penalty by Stephen Breyer

Author:Stephen Breyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

III

“Cruel”—Excessive Delays

The problems of reliability and unfairness almost inevitably lead to a third independent constitutional problem: excessively long periods of time that individuals typically spend on death row, alive but under sentence of death. That is to say, delay is in part a problem that the Constitution’s own demands create. Given the special need for reliability and fairness in death penalty cases, the Eighth Amendment does, and must, apply to the death penalty “with special force.”63 Those who face “that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution.”64 At the same time, the Constitution insists that “every safeguard” be “observed” when “a defendant’s life is at stake.”65

These procedural necessities take time to implement. And, unless we abandon the procedural requirements that assure fairness and reliability, we are forced to confront the problem of increasingly lengthy delays in capital cases. Ultimately, though these legal causes may help to explain, they do not mitigate the harms caused by delay itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.