The U.S. Death Penalty as Torture

Abstract: Though of course the U.S. Supreme Court has never declared this to be true, many elements of the U.S. death-penalty system constitute torture. The threat of death is real; it is slow; it is often repeated, sometimes removed, sometimes reinstated; it is imposed randomly and capriciously; conditions of confinement induce trauma; and the executions themselves are often botched. We first review definitions of torture, then we review various factual elements of the modern death penalty system (e.g., that in place since the monumental Furman decision eliminated all existing death sentences in 1972) that arguably constitute torture. There is nothing isolated about the torture elements of the U.S. death-penalty system. There is perhaps no method to avoid elements of psychological torture, given the slow, premeditated, ritualized, and bureaucratic nature of any state machinery of death. The U.S. death-penalty system systematically subjects thousands of individuals to psychological torment in a number of ways that we document here. Because the U.S. is a representative democracy, all Americans share responsibility for these outcomes, though almost none are aware of what we describe.