Justice Breyer Calls For Death Penalty Review

This week, the Supreme Court rejected appeals from Ohio and Florida related to capital punishment, but in in his dissent Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, “The time has come for this court to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty.” One of the cases rejected this week concerned an Ohio man whose execution was stalled when authorities could not properly insert a needle into his vein to administer the lethal dose of drugs. Another case concerns a Florida prisoner who has been on death row for 40 years. “Forty years is more time than an average person could expect to live his entire life when America constitutionally forbade the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments,” Breyer wrote, noting that half of all Americans alive today had not been born when the prisoner was convicted in 1976. “As I and other justices have previously pointed out, individuals who are executed are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but, rather, are individuals chosen at random, on the basis, perhaps of geography, perhaps of the views of individual prosecutors, or still worse on the basis of race.”