He further expressed the view[1] that—
"[t]he high service rendered by the 'cruel and unusual' punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment is to require legislatures to write penal laws that are evenhanded, non-selective, and nonarbitrary …"
[159]On the issue of arbitrariness Brennan J observed in Furman[2] that—
"In determining whether a punishment comports with human dignity, we are aided also by a second principle inherent in the [Cruel and Unusual Punishments] Clause—that the State must not arbitrarily inflict a severe punishment. This principle derives from the notion that the State does not respect human dignity when, without reason, it inflicts upon some people a severe punishment that it does not inflict upon others."
He also stated[3] (in a context not dissimilar to ours where a vast number of murders are committed, a large number of accused charged and convicted but relatively few ultimately executed) that—
"No one has yet suggested a rational basis that could differentiate in those terms the few who die from the many who go to prison. Crimes and criminals simply do not admit of a distinction that can be drawn so finely as to explain, on that ground, the execution of such a tiny sample of those eligible … Nor is the distinction credible in fact."
[160]Stewart J founded his judgment on the fact that the imposition of so extreme a penalty in pursuance of the Georgia statute was inevitably arbitrary. After referring to the fact that "the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed" he concludes simply by holding that—
"the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed"[4]
[161]In Callins v. Collins, cert. denied, 114 S.Ct. 1127, 127 L.Ed 435 (1994) Blackmun J filed a dissenting opinion. In it he observed that[5]—
"[e]xperience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration
of death, see Furman v. Georgia, supra, can never be achieved without
