William J. BrennanThinkers

Capital punishment is a violation of our constitution and a besmirching of the constitutional vision of human dignity more than anything else.

Capital punishment is an act that it treats members of the human race as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

Capital punishment is at bottom a moral battle over whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.

Capital punishment is, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity and an abrogation of constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

Capital punishment is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

The Constitution of the US is read in the only way that we Justices can read it: as 20th-century Americans.

The Constitution of the US is, in its amended totality, the lodestar for our aspirations, and like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked.

The Constitution of the US is a document framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

The Constitution of the US is a document whose majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure, and thus calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text.

The Constitution of the US 1s 2enius rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

The Constitution of the US is read in the only way it can be read: as Twentieth Century Americans, and while one looks to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation, the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.