An article in The New York Times yesterday discussed the circumstances surrounding the incarceration of death row inmates and whether or not their extended wait for their punishment while in prison could be constituted as cruel and unusual punishment.
The article mentions the case of Manuel Valle, a Floridian who killed a police officer when he was 27-years-old and was executed for the crime this past September at the age of 61. The Supreme Court denied to grant him a stay of execution, but Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, asserting that the 33 years Valle spent on death row amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
In response, Ken Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argued that it is “a very strange argument to say that a murderer can delay justice with protracted appeals for decades and then turn around and claim his own delay as a reason to escape his deserved punishment altogether.”
Scheidegger has a valid point. Many convicted criminals on death row delay their executions for years, even decades, through the convoluted court system, appeals or stays of execution, so for the court to suddenly decide that this length of time spent awaiting punishment is cruel is illogical, as the so-called torture is self-imposed.
If it were the state or the courts themselves that were delaying these executions, Justice Breyer would have a valid point because the state would be putting these criminals through mental torture as they await their deaths. However, because the delay is generally self-imposed, it cannot constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because the punishment itself is not generated by the state.
Additionally, if the courts were to impose limitations on number of delays or length of time spent on death row, the individual nuances of each case would be lost in a blanket regulation. These death row cases are so sensitive in nature and so varied in circumstance that a blanket cap on the amount of time an inmate can spend on death row would only hurt those who genuinely need the time to appeal.
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