Justices Reject Cases on Execution Delay

WASHINGTON — The execution of a convicted murderer is not cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled more than 20 years ago. And neither apparently is it cruel and unusual punishment to keep an inmate on death row for 20 years awaiting his execution.

On Monday, the high court turned away appeals from two inmates who said that it is “inhuman” and “denial of fundamental human dignity” to hold an inmate on death row for two decades, a claim that was ridiculed as bizarre by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Rarely do the justices comment on the denial of an appeal, but the question of death penalty delays prompted a sharp exchange of opinions on Monday.

A conservative who is often exasperated by his liberal colleagues, Thomas said that the high court itself deserves much of the blame for the long delays between a jury’s delivery of a death sentence and the execution of a murderer.

Killers stave off their executions by taking full advantage of “this court’s Byzantine death penalty jurisprudence,” Thomas said, and by filing multiple appeals that take years to resolve.

“It is incongruous to arm capital defendants with an arsenal of ‘constitutional’ claims with which they may delay their executions and simultaneously to complain when executions are inevitably delayed,” Thomas said.

He was responding to an open invitation issued five years ago by Justice John Paul Stevens that urged defense lawyers to challenge executions which have been delayed for many years. At some point, the delay itself becomes a basis for finding the death sentence unconstitutional, Stevens said.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer sounded the same theme Monday, saying that inmates have “a particularly strong” claim if they can show that a state’s flawed procedures caused long delays. He noted that high courts in India, Jamaica and Zimbabwe, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, have declared it “cruel and inhuman” to carry out death sentences after years of delay.

As of December 1997, 24 U.S. prisoners had been on death row for more than 20 years, Breyer noted. But, for now, Stevens and Breyer appear to stand alone.

Monday’s order rejecting the appeals in the two cases is not an official ruling. But it takes the votes of at least four justices to take up an issue, and Thomas said this one should be put to rest.

“I am not aware of a single American court that has accepted such an 8th Amendment claim” based on a delayed execution, Thomas wrote. “I submit the court should consider the experiment closed.”

In one case, Nebraska inmate Carey Dean Moore was sentenced to death in 1979 for killing two Omaha taxi drivers (Moore vs. Nebraska, 99-5291). In the second, Florida inmate Askari Abdullah Muhammad, formerly known as Thomas Knight, was sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting and killing a Miami couple (Muhammad vs. Florida, 98-9741). While in prison, he was also convicted of killing a prison guard.