Title: Death Row Inmates Wait Years Before Execution - Sidebar - The New York Times
Headings: Lifelong Death Sentences
Sidebar
Lifelong Death Sentences

Content: Death Row Inmates Wait Years Before Execution - Sidebar - The New York Times
U.S. | Lifelong Death Sentences
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/us/death-row-inmates-wait-years-before-execution.html
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Supported by
Continue reading the main story
Sidebar
Lifelong Death Sentences
By Adam Liptak
Oct. 31, 2011
WASHINGTON —In 1978, when he was 27, Manuel Valle killed a police officer in Coral Gables, Fla. In September, when he was 61, Mr. Valle was put to death for his crime. A couple of hours earlier, the Supreme Court had refused to stay his execution — with one dissent. Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that the 33 years Mr. Valle had spent on death row amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. That line of reasoning strikes some supporters of the death penalty as perverse. “ 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,” said Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. But Justice Breyer’s approach has historical support, and it is in line with international opinion. “Our Constitution was written at a time when delay between sentencing and execution could be measured in days or weeks, not decades,” Justice Breyer wrote in another dissent on the same subject, this one in 1999. English law in the 18th century called for executions to take place on “the next day but one” after sentencing. Foreign courts have ruled that living for decades under the threat of imminent execution is a form of psychological torment. “There is an instinctive revulsion against the prospect of hanging a man after he has been held under sentence of death for many years,” the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which is based in London and hears appeals from former British colonies, wrote in a 1993 ruling in favor of two inmates who had spent more than five years on death row in Jamaica, commuting their sentences to life in prison.