Some ask whether it is cruel and unusual punishment for a death row inmate to wait years, or even decades, before the sentence is carried out.
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.
via www.nytimes.com
