Stephen Breyer

‘It is irretrievably broken.’

October 5, 2015

The Week

‘As Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in June observes, the uncertainty that prevails over the death penalty system is in itself a form of cruelty that should be forbidden by the Eighth Amendment.’

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This is the reality of the death penalty. A division of labor is set up in which numerous officials, operating within their formal legal authority, act in concert to produce a flagrantly unjust outcome for which no one person is responsible. As the legal scholar Mark Graber puts it, “Richard Glossip is likely to be executed because capital punishment enhances prosecutorial power to secure unreliable and arbitrary death sentences.”