Law Cannot Stand Aside From

Use Of A Mentally Ill Person's Involuntary Confession Is Antithetical To The Notion Of Fundamental Fairness Embodied In The Due Process Clause.

Death Is Not Only An Unusually Severe Punishment, Unusual In Its Pain, In Its Finality And In Its Enormity, But Is Serves No Penal Purpose More Effectively Than A Less Severe Punishment.

At Bottom, The Battle Has Been Waged On Moral Grounds. The Country Has Debated Whether A Society For Which The Dignity Of The Individual Is The Supreme Value Can, Without A Fundamental Inconsistency, Follow The Practice Of Deliberately Putting One Of Its Members To Death.

It Is Tempting To Pretend That Minorities On Death Row Share A Fate In No Way Connected To Our Own, That Our Treatment Of Them Sounds No Echoes Beyond The Chambers In Which They Die. Such An Illusion Is Ultimately Corrosive, For The Reverberations Of Injustice Are Not So Easily Confined.

We Current Justices Read The Constitution In The Only Way That We Can: As 20th-century Americans.