An extended stay on death row does not violate the Eighth Amendment, although the Court raised this issue in Lackey v. Texas, 514 U.S. 1045 (1995). In Lackey, the Supreme Court rejected a certiorari defendant who claimed that his 17 years on death row violated the Eighth Amendment. Although the Court referred to the discretion of the lower courts on this issue, the decision left open the possibility of future review by the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court ruled in subsequent cases, including Foster v. Florida, 537 U.S. 990 (2002) (27 years on death row); Ritter v. Florida, 528 U.S. 990 (1999) (19 years on death row); and Valle v.
Florida, 132 S.Ct. 1 (2011) (33 years on death row). The Soering case has been cited as a precedent in international extradition cases, although today courts in countries where the death penalty is not sentenced to death often do not extradite to the United States because of the possibility of execution itself, regardless of how long the death row is waiting, since the death penalty itself is considered a violation of human rights. The time prisoners in the United States spend on death row before being executed became an interesting topic in the death penalty debate in the early 2000s. The debate intensified around the 2005 execution of Michael Ross, a Connecticut inmate who had been on death row for 17 years, and was spurred by the writings of several Supreme Court justices — most recently Justice Stephen Breyer — who unsuccessfully asked the court to consider the issue. The court agreed. In its decision that he could not be sent to a place that would sentence him to death, the court did not cite the death penalty itself, but the “death row phenomenon,” in which prisoners waited years before being executed while their case was contested. (Associated Press, July 27, 1989).
Soering was extradited in 1990, but only on the prosecution`s promise not to seek the death penalty. The amount of time U.S. prisoners spend on death row has lengthened in recent years, raising questions about the constitutionality of the additional sentence. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed this issue, it has been repeatedly cited as a serious issue by death penalty experts in the United States and by courts outside the United States. Opponents of the death penalty argue that solitary confinement and uncertainty about the fate of a prisoner is a form of psychological violence, and that long-term death row inmates, in particular, are likely to suffer from mental disorders if they do not already suffer from such a disorder. This is called the death row phenomenon. It is estimated that five to ten percent of all inmates on death row suffer from mental illness. [1] Some inmates may attempt suicide. There have been calls for a ban on the imposition of the death penalty on mentally ill prisoners[2] and also for jurisprudence such as Atkins v. Virginia to encourage this.
Executions continue to take place for people with overt intellectual disabilities due to poor legal representation and high standards of evidence. [3] As of October 1, 2018, there were 2,721 people on death row in the United States. [7] Since 1977, the states of Texas (464), Virginia (108), and Oklahoma (94) have executed the highest number of death row inmates. [5] In 2010, California (683), Florida (390), Texas (330) and Pennsylvania (218) were home to more than half of death row inmates. As of 2020, the longest-serving death row prisoner in the United States to be executed was Thomas Knight, who served for more than 39 years. He was executed in Florida in 2014. [8] [9] While Knight was the longest-executed inmate, Gary Alvord arrived on Florida death row in 1974 and died of a brain tumor 39 years later, on May 19, 2013, after spending more time on death row than any American. [10] Brandon Astor Jones spent 36 years on death row (with a brief stint in the general population at his sentencing trial) before being executed for murder by the state of Georgia in 2016 at the age of 72.
[11] The oldest prisoner on death row in the United States was Leroy Nash, 94, in Arizona. He died of natural causes on February 12, 2010. [12] On death row, those serving the death penalty are typically isolated from other prisoners, excluded from prison education and employment programs, and severely limited in terms of visits and exercise, spending up to 23 hours a day alone in their cells. Moreover, unlike prisoners in the general population, death row inmates, even in solitary confinement, live in a constant state of uncertainty as to the date of their execution. For some death row inmates, this isolation and fear leads to a sharp deterioration in their health and mental state. Death row is defined as the section of a prison where prisoners sentenced to death are held pending execution. Death row is aging and becoming increasingly fragile and, as several recent death sentences suggest, this phenomenon raises legal, practical and humanitarian concerns. But after the suspension of the death penalty by the Supreme Court in 1972 and its declaration in 1976 that a genuine appeal standard was a prerequisite for any constitutionally acceptable system of the death penalty, many reforms were introduced to create a less arbitrary system. This has resulted in lengthy appeals, as mandatory criminal reviews have become the norm and constant changes in legislation and technology have necessitated a review of individual sentences. On December 9, 2021, Oklahoma executed Bigler Stouffer, 79, the longest-serving death row inmate and oldest person executed in the state. James Frazier, Ohio`s longest-serving death row inmate, was scheduled to appear in court on Sept.
20. He was executed in October 2021 before dying of COVID on November 19, 2020. He suffered from dementia after a series of strokes, could not walk and needed the help of aids to perform his daily tasks. His lawyers had filed a motion to prohibit his execution for mental incapacity. Michael Ross was about an hour away from becoming the first executed inmate in New England in 45 years when his lethal injection was abruptly halted in 2005.