Today in Supreme Court History: July 18, 1942

7/18/1942: Justice George Sutherland dies.

Justice George Sutherland

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Hamblen v. Dugger, 492 U.S. 929 (decided July 18, 1989): Staying execution pending decision on certiorari, with the stay to dissolve if cert was denied. Cert was denied on 6/28/90, 497 U.S. 1031, with Brennan and Marshall as usual dissenting, “adhering to our views that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments”. For some reason execution did not happen then; it happened the day after another application for a stay was denied on 9/21/90, 497 U.S. 1054, with only Marshall dissenting (Brennan had retired by then). According to the AP report of Hamblen’s electrocution, “During his last minutes, he smiled, winked and stuck his tongue out at witnesses in the death chamber. In his final statement, Hamblen made a play on President Bush’s campaign promise not to raise taxes. ‘You know that I had trouble with that four-letter L-word, so like George, read my lips,’ Hamblen said to Judith Dougherty, one of his state-funded attorneys. He then mouthed the words, ‘I love you.’” He had at one point asked his appeals to be dropped and said he was depressed that his execution had been postponed so long. His crime: in the process of robbing a lingerie store, shooting the owner in the back of the head when she pressed a silent alarm button.

[NvEric]

Fitting sentence.

[Dan Schiavetta]

It would have been more punishing to him to make him serve a life sentence.

[Noscitur a sociis]

How strange, then, that he put so much effort into getting his more lenient sentence replaced by a harsher one! He must have really liked being punished.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That is actually true of a number of convicted murderers, beginning with Gary Gilmore. He wanted a heroic, brave death and death penalty advocates were very willing to let him have his wish.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

"He had at one point asked his appeals to be dropped and said he was depressed that his execution had been postponed so long."

Not much effort in the end. He was executed around six years after he committed his crimes.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

John Stuart Mill argues in favor of the death penalty:

“If, in our horror of inflicting death, we endeavour to devise some punishment for the living criminal which shall act on the human mind with a deterrent force at all comparable to that of death, we are driven to inflictions less severe indeed in appearance, and therefore less efficacious, but far more cruel in reality. Few, I think, would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggravated murder, less than imprisonment with hard labor for life; that is the fate to which a murderer would be consigned by the mercy which shrinks from putting him to death. But has it been sufficiently considered what sort of a mercy this is, and what kind of life it leaves to him? If, indeed, the punishment is not really inflicted—if it becomes the sham which a few years ago such punishments were rapidly becoming—then, indeed, its adoption would be almost tantamount to giving up the attempt to repress murder altogether. But if it really is what it professes to be, and if it is realized in all its rigour by the popular imagination, as it very probably would not be, but as it must be if it is to be efficacious, it will be so shocking that when the memory of the crime is no longer fresh, there will be almost insuperable difficulty in executing it. What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards—debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet? Yet even such a lot as this, because there is no one moment at which the suffering is of terrifying intensity, and, above all, because it does not contain the element, so imposing to the imagination, of the unknown, is universally reputed a milder punishment than death—stands in all codes as a mitigation of the capital penalty, and is thankfully accepted as such. For it is characteristic of all punishments which depend on duration for their efficacy—all, therefore, which are not corporal or pecuniary—that they are more rigorous than they seem; while it is, on the contrary, one of the strongest recommendations a punishment can have, that it should seem more rigorous than it is; for its practical power depends far less on what it is than on what it seems.”

https://americanliterature.com/author/john-stuart-mill/essay/speech-in-favor-of-capital-punishment

[JoeFromtheBronx]

George Sutherland in Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty:

"Such regulations are sustained, under the complex conditions of our day, for reasons analogous to those which justify traffic regulations, which, before the advent of automobiles and rapid transit street railways, would have been condemned as fatally arbitrary and unreasonable. And in this there is no inconsistency, for, while the meaning of constitutional guaranties never varies, the scope of their application must expand or contract to meet the new and different conditions which are constantly coming within the field of their operation. In a changing world, it is impossible that it should be otherwise. But although a degree of elasticity is thus imparted not to the meaning, but to the application of constitutional principles, statutes and ordinances which, after giving due weight to the new conditions, are found clearly not to conform to the Constitution of course must fall."

==

James Hamblen was executed after around six years. Very quick by today's standards. The details also note he murdered someone else too.

https://murderpedia.org/male.H/h1/hamblen-james-william.htm