U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

"I disagree very much with Justice Scalia’s certitude that we have never put to death an innocent person. It’s one of the reasons why I personally am opposed to the death penalty. We have the greatest judicial system in the world, but at the end of the day it’s made up of men and women making decisions, tough decisions. Men and women who are dedicated, but dedicated men and women can make mistakes. And I find it hard to believe that in our history that has not happened."

- U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in an interview for The Marshall Project, Nov. 17, 2014.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

Eliot Spitzer

"We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal."

-Albert Camus

"We oppose the death penalty not just for what it does to those guilty of heinous crimes, but for what it does to all of us: It offers the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life."

-Rev. Joseph A. Fiorenza, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, U.S. Catholic Conference, 1999

"The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment...
It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society."

—United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall

"As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivically opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder."

-Corretta Scott King

"We regard all forms of capital punishment as barbaric and obsolete"

-Rabannical Assembly

"The Death Penalty is nothing less than human sacrifice. It has ritual, religion, and it is to appease the God of vengence. This society accuses the Aztecs of human sacrifice when they practice human sacrifice in virtually every state in the union."

-Russell Means, First National Director of the American Indian Movement, Activist

"You can take away our names and replace them with numbers, cage and store us in conditions not even fit for your family dog, and exterminate us at your whim, but we are still human beings, capable of everything from love and beauty to violence and hate."

-- Thomas B. Whitaker, Texas Death Row Inmate #999522.

"Evidence of innocence is irrelevant!"

-- Mary Sue Terry, former Attorney General of Virginia, replying to an appeal to introduce new evidence from a prisoner sentenced to death.

"To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today."

-- Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher

"The gallows is not only a machine of death but a symbol. It is the symbol of terror, cruelty, and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism. It stands for everything that mankind must reject, if mankind is to survive the present crisis."

-- Arthur Koestler, English novelist and essayist.

"And so to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honour, and peace, until the Gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand."

-- George Bernard Shaw, English playwright

"I don't think there's any words in the English language to explain what it's --what it's like to-- to sit on Texas death row and your thoughts are laying on that gurney, convicted but innocent and being put to death."

-- Kerry Max Cook, twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1977 rape murder of a 21-year-old secretary in Tyler, TX. Cook was released after 22 years

"The conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it, and then it is only in dropping his appeals that he has any sense of control over his fate."

-- Dr. Stuart Grassian, psychiatrist and expert in death row inmates; about prisoners who "volunteer" for execution

"I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery."

-- Andrei Sakharov, Russian nuclear physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate

"I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity." --

Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

"But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one's not knowing for certain that in an hour, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that's bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it's certain ... To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute ..., but in the other case (execution) all that last hope which makes dying ten times as easy is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible."

-- Feodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist

"There is a part of the warden that dies with his prisoner. Nobody else can suffer the intimacy of impending death, or experience the pitiable helplessness involved, in the same way as the warden and his condemned prisoner. Both are victims, unwilling captives of a human tragedy that is presented on a stage shrouded by mystery. It is played before a small, invited audience that is hidden from public view. Acted out in the darkness of night, as if to shield the citizenry from the awful reality of it all, an execution is a drama that panders to public fear and to a lust for vengeance, which is otherwise disguised as justice."

-- Donald A. Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's State Penitentiary (Parchman) who supervised two executions in the prison gas chamber before quitting his job and publicly opposing capital punishment

"It is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree....I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge."

-- Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official hangman, in his 1974 autobiography

Rajya Sabha to debate death penalty today
The resolution, set to be discussed in the Upper House on Thursday, quotes former President A P J Abdul Kalam’s support for abolition of the death penalty.


- See more at: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/rajya-sabha-to-debate-death-penalty-today/#sthash.5ZVdYpr3.dpuf

Unfortunately

"... only six members of Parliament, from a full 900 or so in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, attended the Law Commission's public consultations on the abolishing of the death penalty in early July - Kanimozhi of the AIADMK, Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor of the Congress, Varun Gandhi of the BJP, Majid Memon (and early counsel for Yakub Memon) of the NCP and Ashish Khetan of the Aam Aadmi Party.

It is not known what the influential Law Commission is going to say when it gives its report next month. Suffice to say that most of those who participated in the consultations, with the exception of the Supreme Court lawyer Dushyant Dave (no relation to Justice Anil Dave who rejected Memon's curative petition a few days ago) were against the death penalty. The gathering also included people like Julio Ribeiro, the man who successfully dealt with the insurgency in Punjab in the wake of Operation Blue Star, as well as the first chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah."

www.dailyo.in/politics/yakub-memon-nagpur-central-jail-bhullar-rajoana-afzal-guru-ujjwal-nikam/story/1/5326.html

Yakub Memon hanging: Kanimozhi to move private member’s bill in Rajya Sabha to abolish death penalty

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Yakub-Memon-hanging-Kanimozhi-to-move-private-members-bill-in-Rajya-Sabha-to-abolish-death-penalty/articleshow/48283942.cms?

What we also need is for some High Court and Supreme Court judges to speak up in general against the death penalty on moral grounds in some judgments.

The International Commission of Jurists has condemned the State murder of Yakub Memon

www.icj.org/india-the-icj-condemns-the-execution-of-yakub-memon/

"The ICJ strongly condemned the execution of Yakub Memon, who was hanged in Nagpur Central Jail, India this morning.

“Yakub Memon’s execution is a distressing and regressive move, keeping India in the minority of countries which continue to carry out executions,” said Sam Zarifi, ICJ Asia Pacific Regional Director. “While Yakub Memon was convicted of terrible crimes, executing him was not the solution. India should immediately put in place a moratorium on the death penalty.”

..."

No Deterrence

The death penalty fails to deter crime.


"A July 2009 study titled "DO EXECUTIONS LOWER HOMICIDE RATES?: THE VIEWS OF LEADING CRIMINOLOGISTS" by Michael L. Radelet and Traci L. LaCock, demonstrates an overwhelming consensus among criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty does not add deterrent effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment.

..."

www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=82

Is the tide turning against the death penalty in the US?

www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/692/the-tide-turns-against-the-death-penalty-in-the-us

"On ... 29 June, the nine-member Supreme Court ruled against the three death-row inmates in Oklahoma who had sought to bar the use of the drug Midazolam in lethal injections. But participants took heart in dissenting opinions by Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Ginsburg, who called the death penalty’s constitutionality into question and signalled the interest of America’s highest court to revisit the issue.

Several states have abolished the death penalty in recent years, most recently, Nebraska in May. And everywhere, even in Texas, death sentences and executions seem to be slowing down. With botched executions, prosecutorial misconduct, and exonerations (155 to date since 1973) covered regularly in the press, all sides of the political spectrum are realising the senselessness of the death penalty.
Bonowitz told me: “As more states abandon their use of capital punishment either in law or in practice, it’s fair to expect the Supreme Court to apply its 'evolving standards of decency' doctrine to the death penalty as a whole, and strike it down the same way they disallowed the execution of juveniles and those with intellectual disabilities. Hopefully the right case will come along soon.”

..."

AS GLOSSIP EXECUTION NEARS, LAWYERS CHALLENGE DEATH PENALTY ITSELF AS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/glossip-lawyers-challenge-death-penalty-itself-as-cruel-unusual/

"

Lawyers for Richard Glossip and two other men on Oklahoma’s death row, who last month lost their challenge to their state’s controversial lethal injection protocol, have again asked the Supreme Court to consider their clients’ plight.

But the petition, filed Friday afternoon, does not ask the justices to reconsider their June 29 decision in Glossip v. Gross, which cleared the way for Oklahoma to use midazolam — a drug implicated in a number of botched executions — in its lethal injection protocol. Rather, the petition attacks the death penalty itself as a cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth Amendment.

“It would be appropriate for the Court to use this case to address the constitutionality of the death penalty,” the pleading reads, “because the outcome will turn not on facts specific to any single litigant, but on circumstances common to the administration of the death penalty.”

The new petition, filed by federal public defenders, was written in direct response to a request by Justice Stephen Breyer, made as part of a 40-page dissent filed in Glossip, and joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Breyer’s dissent was a detailed, exhaustive attack on the death penalty’s many proven flaws, from its racial bias to the problems of error and misconduct. “[R]ather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” Breyer wrote, “I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.”

Today’s filing seeks to affirmatively answer that question, addressing several persistent pitfalls of the death penalty that were raised by Breyer and are embodied in the Oklahoma cases of three named plaintiffs — Richard Glossip, John Grant and Benjamin Cole. In particular, the petition picks up on Breyer’s criticism of the death penalty for its “lack of reliability, the arbitrary application of a serious and irreversible punishment [and the] individual suffering caused by long delays.”

In Glossip’s case, the petition directly addresses Breyer’s concern for the innocent people who have been sent to death row — and some potentially executed. Glossip has consistently maintained his innocence of the crime that sent him to die: the supposed murder-for-hire of his boss, Barry Van Treese, in 1997.

..."

From www.politico.com/story/2015/06/supreme-court-justice-stephen-breyer-death-penalty-may-be-unconstitutional-119547.html

Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent: Death penalty may be unconstitutional
By ADAM B. LERNER 6/29/15 1:09 PM EDT Updated 6/29/15 5:35 PM EDT
The death penalty may be unconstitutional, two of the Supreme Court’s liberal judges suggested on Monday.
In a dissent to the majority’s opinion in Glossip v. Gross, which upheld Oklahoma’s use of a key drug used for lethal injections, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called for a renewed legal debate over the death penalty.
The court has not ruled on the constitutionality of the death penalty at-large since Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 — though it has examined various aspect of death penalty protocols, including applying the punishment to the mentally handicapped, to minors, and via various methods — and Breyer wrote that “[t]he circumstances and the evidence of the death penalty’s application have changed radically since then.”
“Given these changes, I believe that it is now time to reopen the question,” he wrote, adding that the past 40 years of the death penalty in America have led him to believe “that the death penalty, in and of itself, now likely constitutes a legally prohibited ‘cruel and unusual punishmen[t].’”
The fact that the death penalty is applied so sporadically “is the antithesis of the rule of law,” Breyer wrote. Citing numerous studies, the justice concluded that “the factors that most clearly ought to affect application of the death penalty — namely, comparative egregiousness of the crime — often do not. Other studies show that circumstances that ought not to affect application of the death penalty, such as race, gender, or geography, often do.”
Breyer also cited concerns about “excessive delays” in death penalty proceedings and observed that around 20 states have abolished the death penalty outright, while many more have not executed an inmate in years. And he pointed to an emerging global consensus on the death penalty, noting that a clear majority of United Nations member countries have ceased executions over the past few decades.
Sen. Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, flips through several redistricting maps during a special legislative committee hearing to discuss the a state commission's proposed maps of new congressional and legislative districts, at the Arizona Capitol Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Breyer and a number of other justices have previously expressed their personal opposition to the death penalty, but few have expressed outright the belief that the punishment violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. At one point in 2011, Breyer told an audience at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia that “[o]nly the legislature can abolish the death penalty,” before arguing that public opinion could be swayed on the issue via politics.
But Breyer, in his dissent in Glossip v. Gross, recognized that while the issue of the death penalty, in and of itself, perhaps could be viewed as a legislative matter, “the matters I have discussed, such as lack of reliability, the arbitrary application of a serious and irreversible punishment, individual suffering caused by long delays, and lack of penological purpose are quintessentially judicial matters.”
He concluded, “At the very least, the Court should call for full briefing on the basic question” of the death penalty.
The larger case at hand, Glossip v. Gross, did not deal explicitly with the constitutionality of the death penalty per se, but rather whether or not the state of Oklahoma’s use of the drug midazolam as an anesthetic before executions prevented cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, argued that it did not, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s three other Democratic appointees, dissented. (The decision “leaves petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake,” Sotomayor wrote.)
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in separate concurring opinions, were the only two to respond directly to Breyer’s arguments regarding the overall constitutionality of the death penalty.
In typically colorful prose, Scalia said that it was “Groundhog Day” and that Breyer was trying to revive a long line of anti-death penalty activism even though the Constitution states that “no person … shall be deprived of life … without due process of law,” effectively referring to death penalty practices in place at the time of the founders.
Scalia referred to Breyer’s argument as “gobbledy-gook,” while Thomas called it “pseudoscientific” and based upon an “imaginary constitutional rule against ‘arbitrariness’.”
Later, Scalia wrote that Breyer’s logic saying excessive delays, caused by anti-death penalty activists, make the practice unconstitutional “calls to mind the man sentenced to death for killing his parents, who pleads for mercy on the ground that he is an orphan.”
He concluded, “Justice Breyer does not just reject the death penalty, he rejects the Enlightenment” for arguing against a punishment that even the acclaimed moral philosopher Immanuel Kant supported.
Though the case ultimately left the feud between the two Republican appointees and two Democratic appointees unresolved, Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which largely opposes the death penalty, said the vigorous debate sets up a future challenge.
“The death penalty itself, I think, is in trouble,” Dieter said, pointing to previous decisions from Justice Anthony Kennedy suggesting he might someday side with Breyer on the issue. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Dieter added, are likely sympathetic to Breyer’s reasoning despite their decisions not to sign the tangential dissent.
“[Breyer’s dissent] says the court should be ready to debate the very constitutionality of the death penalty,” considering it as it’s applied in the 21st century and not as it was debated in the 1970s, Dieter concluded. “Times have changed.”

Read more: www.politico.com/story/2015/06/supreme-court-justice-stephen-breyer-death-penalty-may-be-unconstitutional-119547.html#ixzz3hOVqmlRb

The New Yorker on Justice Breyer's dissent against the death penalty notes:

"...the American public seems to be changing its mind. A 2014 Washington Post poll reported that a majority of Americans favored life without parole over death as a penalty for murder. Over the past fifteen years, both death sentences and executions have dropped dramatically. Thirty states have either abolished the death penalty or not conducted an execution in more than eight years. Those states that still execute have become outliers even within the United States, which in turn is an outlier in the developed world. Considering these trends, the abolition of capital punishment is probably only a matter of time. Whether its end will come at the hands of the Supreme Court or the people remains to be seen."

www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/justice-breyer-against-the-death-penalty

Some more links on US Supreme Court Judge - Justice Breyer's recent path-breaking call for abolition of the death penalty - supported by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

www.businessinsider.in/Justice-Breyer-perfectly-captured-the-major-problem-with-the-death-penalty/articleshow/47868863.cms

www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/29/breyer_and_the_death_penalty_the_justice_calls_for_its_abolition.html

edition.cnn.com/2015/06/29/politics/scotus-death-penalty-justice-scalia-breyer/

There is one anti-death penalty quote which expresses a view very pertinent to Yakub Memon's case who spent 22 years in jail most of them in solitary confinement, and which deserves mention here.

"When you execute a man who has been on death row seven, eight, 10 or 12 years, you are not executing the same man that came in."

Don Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary