Death is today an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality, and in its enormity. No other existing punishment is comparable to death in terms of physical and mental suffering. … Since the discontinuance of flogging as a constitutionally permissible punishment…, death remains the only punishment that may involve the conscious infliction of physical pain. In addition, we know that mental pain is an inseparable part of our practice of punishing criminals by death, for the prospect of pending execution exacts a frightful toll during the inevitable long wait between the imposition of sentence and the actual infliction of death. … The unusual severity of death is manifested most clearly in its finality and enormity. Death, in these respects, is in a class by itself.
In a Californian case, the one of The People v Anderson (1972) 493 P 2d 880, Wright CJ observed (at 894) that:
The cruelty of capital punishment lies not only in the execution itself and the pain incident thereto, but also in the dehumanising effects of the lengthy imprisonment prior to execution during which the judicial and administrative procedures essential to due process of law are carried out. Penologists and medical experts agree that the process of carrying out a verdict of death is often so degrading and brutalising to the human spirit as to constitute psychological torture.
Liacos J elaborated on that aspect of the matter in the judgment which he delivered when District Attorney for the Suffolk District v Watson and Others (1980) 381 Mass 648 was decided in Massachusetts. The passages that I shall quote (at 678 - 9, 681 and 683) are vivid. They went thus:
The ordeals of the condemned are inherent and inevitable in any system that informs the condemned person of his sentence and provides for a gap between sentence and execution. Whatever one believes about the cruelty of the death penalty itself, this violence done the prisoner's mind must afflict the conscience of enlightened government and give the civilised heart no rest. … The condemned must confront this primal terror directly, and in the most demeaning circumstances. A condemned man knows, subject to the possibility of successful appeal or commutation, the time and manner of his death. His thoughts about death must necessarily be focussed more precisely than other people's. He must wait for a specific death, not merely expect death in the abstract. Apart from cases of suicide or terminal illness, this certainty is unique to those who are sentenced to death. The state puts the question of death to the condemned person, and he must grapple with it without the consolation that he will die naturally or with his humanity intact. A condemned person experiences an extreme form of debasement. … The death sentence itself is a declaration that society deems the prisoner a nullity, less than human and unworthy to live. But that negation of his personality carries through the entire period between sentence and execution.
A similar account was furnished by Gubbay CJ in the Catholic Commission case when he said (at 268 E–H):
