Cite as: 513 U. S. 504 (1995)
Stevens, J., dissenting
is a question of quite a different order from the question whether he should serve a shorter or a longer term of imprisonment, and involves much deeper moral and social issues. The lesson of history is that, when a criminal offence is punishable by death, in practice juries will not confine their attention to the issue of guilt and ignore the sentence which conviction entails. In the past, British juries, by perverse verdicts and by petitions, did at least as much as the campaigns of the reformers to bring the law into conformity with the developing moral conceptions of the community, especially in the field of capital punishment. It may well be argued that the men and women of the jury may be regarded as a microcosm of the community, who will reflect the changing attitudes of society as a whole to the infliction of capital punishment, and that there could therefore be no more appropriate body to decide whether the fellow-citizen whom they have found guilty of murder should suffer the penalty of death prescribed by the law or should receive a lesser punishment." Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 1949-1953, Report 200 (1953).
In ordinary, noncapital sentencing decisions, judges consider society's interests in rehabilitating the offender, in incapacitating him from committing offenses in the future, and in deterring others from committing similar offenses. In capital sentencing decisions, however, rehabilitation plays no role; incapacitation is largely irrelevant, at least when the alternative of life imprisonment without possibility of parole is available; 3 and the assumption that death provides a greater deterrent than other penalties is unsupported by
3 In Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153 (1976), although we noted that incapacitation had been advanced as a rationale for upholding the death penalty, id., at 183, n. 28 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.), the joint opinion placed no reliance on incapacitation as an acceptable justification. See California v. Ramos, 463 U. S. 992, 1023, and n. 9 (1983) (Marshall, J., dissenting).
517
Page: Index Previous 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007