Cite as: 506 U. S. 390 (1993)
Blackmun, J., dissenting
found to contain morphine. The Court held that the deputies' conduct "shock[ed] the conscience" and violated due process. 342 U. S., at 172. "Illegally breaking into the privacy of the petitioner, the struggle to open his mouth and remove what was there, the forcible extraction of his stomach's contents—this course of proceeding by agents of government to obtain evidence is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities. They are methods too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation." Ibid. The lethal injection that petitioner faces as an allegedly innocent person is certainly closer to the rack and the screw than the stomach pump condemned in Rochin. Execution of an innocent person is the ultimate " 'arbitrary impositio[n].' " Planned Parenthood, 505 U. S., at 848. It is an imposition from which one never recovers and for which one can never be compensated. Thus, I also believe that petitioner may raise a substantive due process challenge to his punishment on the ground that he is actually innocent.
C
Given my conclusion that it violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to execute a person who is actually innocent, I find no bar in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S. 293 (1963), to consideration of an actual-innocence claim. Newly discovered evidence of petitioner's innocence does bear on the constitutionality of his execution. Of course, it could be argued this is in some tension with Townsend's statement, id., at 317, that "the existence merely of newly discovered evidence relevant to the guilt of a state prisoner is not a ground for relief on federal habeas corpus." That statement, however, is no more than distant dictum here, for we never had been asked to consider whether the execution of an innocent person violates the Constitution.
II
The majority's discussion of petitioner's constitutional claims is even more perverse when viewed in the light of this
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