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Supreme
Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg supported the minority opinion in the death
penalty case against Lamondre Tucker or Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Photo: CharlesDharapak/AP | MSNBC. |
Lamondre Tucker of Caddo
Parish, Louisiana was convicted of murdering his pregnant girlfriend in 2008
and sentenced to death. Caddo
Parish is responsible for half of the death sentences in the state of Louisiana
but is home to only 5% of that state’s population, and only 5% of its murders.
The United States Supreme Court
rejected the appeal of a death row inmate who has argued that his sentence was
unconstitutional.
The minority opinion, written
by Justice Stephen Breyer, was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, states
that the court should have heard the case in order to explore the
constitutional status of the death penalty, which many argue qualifies as cruel
and unusual punishment.
It stands to reason, as Justice
Breyer pointed out that, had Tucker been tried even in a neighboring parish, he
would not be on death row.
The majority did not offer an
explanation of why they denied a writ of certiorari, which asks for a Supreme
Court review of a lower court finding.
The question of the
constitutionality of the death sentence stems primarily from the question of
whether it should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. In Louisiana, for
example, midazolam, which is the first drug used in lethal injection, does not
make a person incapable of feeling pain.
Subsequently, it is argued, the
other drugs in the process take effect without any kind of safeguard, meaning
that people executed in this way suffer from agonizing pain during the
execution process.
There is also an argument,
which justice Breyer used in a 2015 dissent to Glossip v. Gross, that the death penalty is often arbitrary, and
the process, which supports it, is prone to mistakes.
This seems especially relevant
to sentences passed down before improvements in DNA sampling and other evidence
techniques, which can call into question the guilt of inmates.
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