In an opinion today in connection with the Court’s denial of certiorari in Johnson v. Bredesen, Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Breyer, opines that Tennessee violated a death-row inmate’s Eighth Amendment rights when it delayed carrying out his execution “for nearly 29 years.” As Justice Thomas puts it in his response (internal citations omitted):
In 1981, the petitioner in this case was convicted and sentenced to death for three brutal murders he committed in the course of a robbery. He spent the next 29 years challenging his conviction and sentence in state and federal judicial proceedings and in a petition for executive clemency. His challenges were unsuccessful. He now contends that the very proceedings he used to contest his sentence should prohibit the State from carrying it out, because executing him after the “lengthy and inhumane delay” occasioned by his appeals would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment.
It has been 14 years since JUSTICE STEVENS proposed this “novel” Eighth Amendment argument. I was unaware of any constitutional support for the argument then. And I am unaware of any support for it now. There is simply no authority “in the American constitutional tradition or in this Court’s precedent for the proposition that a defendant can avail himself of the panoply of appellate and collateral procedures and then complain when his execution is delayed.”
I’ll note that Stevens asserts that the inmate “bears little, if any, responsibility for [the nearly 29-year] delay,” but I can’t discern from his opinion what he means by that. Nor do I see why it would matter.