Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer dissented on Monday from the high court’s decision not to hear a death penalty case from Florida, and argued it’s time for the court to reconsider the issue.
The court declined to hear a petition from Henry Sireci, a man convicted of murder and sentenced to death 40 years ago. In his dissent, Breyer argued that, “[T]he time has come for this Court to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty.”
“I should hope that this kind of delay would arise only on the rarest of occasions. But in the ever diminishing universe of actual executions, I fear that delays of this kind have become more common,” Breyer wrote. “As I and other Justices have previously pointed out, individuals who are executed are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but, rather, are individuals chosen at random, on the basis, perhaps of geography, perhaps of the views of individual prosecutors, or still worse on the basis of race.”
Breyer’s call comes on the heels of a split decision from the Supreme Court last week that allowed the execution of an Alabama man to proceed after multiple stays from the high court. The high court has already heard oral arguments in one death penalty case this term, Moore v. Texas, in which the court will decide whether the execution of an inmate after a prolonged period of incarceration — much of it spent in isolated confinement — violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
