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.
Foreign courts have ruled that living for decades under the threat of imminent execution is a form of psychological torment.
Source: The New York Times, October 31, 2011
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