Page:Glossip v. Gross.pdf/119

 Cite as: 576 U. S. ____ (2015)

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SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting

challenge also fails because they identified no available alternative means by which the State may kill them is legally indefensible. A This Court has long recognized that certain methods of execution are categorically off-limits. The Court first confronted an Eighth Amendment challenge to a method of execution in Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U. S. 130 (1879). Although Wilkerson approved the particular method at issue—the firing squad—it made clear that “public dissec­ tion,” “burning alive,” and other “punishments of torture . . . in the same line of unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by [the Eighth A]mendment to the Constitution.” Id., at 135–136. Eleven years later, in rejecting a challenge to the first proposed use of the electric chair, the Court again reiterated that “if the punishment prescribed for an of­ fense against the laws of the State were manifestly cruel and unusual, as burning at the stake, crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, or the like, it would be the duty of the courts to adjudge such penalties to be within the constitutional prohibition.” In re Kemmler, 136 U. S. 436, 446 (1890). In the more than a century since, the Members of this Court have often had cause to debate the full scope of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. See, e.g., Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972). But there has been little dispute that it at the very least precludes the imposition of “barbarous physical punishments.” Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U. S. 337, 345 (1981); see, e.g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U. S. 277, 284 (1983); id., at 312–313 (Burger, C. J., dissenting); Baze, 553 U. S., at 97–99 (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment); Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U. S. 957, 976 (1991) (opinion of SCALIA, J.). Nor has there been any question that the Amendment prohibits such “inherently barbaric punishments under all circumstances.” Graham v. Florida, 560 U. S. 48, 59