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 From the moment he enters the condemned cell, the prisoner is enmeshed in a dehumanising environment of near hopelessness. He is in a place where the sole object is to preserve his life so that he may be executed. The condemned prisoner is the living dead. … He is kept only with other death sentence prisoners—with those whose appeals have been dismissed and who await death or reprieve; or those whose appeals are still to be heard or are pending judgment. While the right to an appeal may raise the prospect of being allowed to live, the intensity of the trauma is much increased by knowledge of its dismissal. The hope of a reprieve is all that is left. Throughout all this time the condemned prisoner constantly broods over his fate. The horrifying spectre of being hanged by the neck and the apprehension of being made to suffer a painful … death is … never far from mind.

The Constitutions of California and Massachusetts forbade cruel punishments. Sentences of death were held in each state to be contraventions of the prohibition which could not stand. The decision reached in the case of the District Attorney for Suffolk was announced by Hennessey CJ, who said (at 664 and 665):

(T)he death penalty is unacceptable under contemporary standards of decency in its unique and inherent capacity to inflict pain. The mental agony is, simply and beyond question, a horror. … We conclude … that the death penalty, with its full panoply of concomitant physical and mental tortures, is impermissibly cruel … when judged by contemporary standards of decency.

Executions were not outlawed altogether, on the other hand, in either Furman v State of Georgia or the case of the Catholic Commission, despite the castigation that they then underwent. The reason lay in the special provisions of the governing charters, the Constitutions of the United States and Zimbabwe, each of which impliedly authorised the punishment, or appeared at least to do so, by protecting the right to life in terms that specifically excluded deaths thus caused. So, while executions could be and were banned in the particular circumstances of the two cases, insufficient room was visible for the total embargo which Brennan J and Gubbay CJ would no doubt have preferred to impose on them. No such obstacle was presented by the Constitution of Massachusetts or found to be raised at that time by the Californian one. None of this detracts, however, from my purpose in repeating the harrowing descriptions given on all four occasions of the ordeal suffered by criminals awaiting and experiencing execution. I am unaware of any criticism ever levelled at those descriptions, which were not disputed before us when reliance was placed on them in argument, and I have no reason to believe that they may have been inaccurate or exaggerated in any material respect. They suffice on the whole to convince me that every sentence of death must be stamped, for the purposes of section 11(2), as an intrinsically cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

I pass to the question whether capital punishment is nevertheless allowed by section 33(1) for the crimes that concern us now. I am not sure that a sentence with a sequel of such cruelty, inhumanity and degradation can ever be rightly regarded in a civilised society as a reasonable or justifiable measure, let alone a necessary one. But I shall assume that the penalty is not innately incapable of meeting those requirements.

The most familiar argument advanced in support of capital punishment, and the main