“Between 2004 and 2009,” Justice Breyer wrote, “just 29 counties (fewer than 1 percent of counties in the country) accounted for approximately half of all death sentences imposed nationwide.”
.. Caddo, he noted, has bucked the national trend in large part because of one man: Dale Cox.
Mr. Cox, 67, who is the acting district attorney and who secured more than a third of Louisiana’s death sentences over the last five years, has lately become one of the country’s bluntest spokesmen for the death penalty. He has readily accepted invitations from reporters to explain whether he really meant what he said to The Shreveport Times in March: that capital punishment is primarily and rightly about revenge and that the state needs to “kill more people.” Yes, he really meant it.
.. “What you’ve ended up with,” Mr. Smith said, “is a personality-driven death penalty.”
Justice Breyer v. the Death Penalty
Evidently, Kennedy and Breyer felt strongly enough about the issues of solitary confinement and capital punishment to break from that tradition.
.. As Kennedy noted, an estimated twenty-five thousand inmates in the United States are currently serving their sentences in solitary confinement—a condition in which the prisoner is generally held, as Kennedy put it, “in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day.” The hour each day when prisoners are allowed out, to shower or exercise, is also usually in isolation. This practice deprives individuals of almost all human contact, other than with guards. Some prisons go even further. According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania are not allowed to have photographs of family members, or newspapers and magazines (unless the periodicals are religious).
.. But, in 1972, the Court did declare the death penalty—as it was then administered—unconstitutional, reasoning that the imposition of death, at the time left to the unfettered discretion of prosecutors and juries, rendered the sanction so arbitrary as to be cruel and unusual. As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.”
.. What’s more, Breyer noted, defendants today routinely spend decades on death row while their cases are reviewed. That lengthy period of intense uncertainty, nearly always spent in solitary confinement, adds to the cruel and unusual character of capital punishment.