The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area together with Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, San Marino, Ukraine, Norway,131 Iceland, Liechtenstein, Mongolia, San Marino, Switzerland132 and the Holy See133, have all, either individually or jointly condemned executions by retentionist states and reiterated calls for the death penalty’s abolition. Opposing capital punishment in all cases and without exceptions, they have also claimed that the penalty undermines human dignity, is not a deterrent against crime and makes miscarriage of justice irreversible. These statements demonstrate increasing support for the view that the death penalty constitutes a violation of the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and growing momentum towards its abolition. In response to the ODIHR questionnaire on the death penalty 2016, 19 participating States have explicitly stated that their respective governments consider the death penalty cruel, unusual and inhuman treatment. National Courts As early as 1996, leading experts stated that there was, “an increasing willingness by judges to limit or totally abolish the death penalty by relying on what is a universal rule of human rights law prohibiting cruel punishment or torture.”134 National courts in the OSCE region have continued to express similar views. Under United States law, executions are unconstitutional if they inflict purposeless and needless pain and suffering.135 What constitutes needless or unnecessary pain is informed by standards of decency as they evolve in light of contemporary human knowledge.136 With regard to the question of whether methods of executions may constitute cruel and unusual punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court found that punishments that involve torture or lingering death, something more than the mere extinction of life, violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.137 In the case of People v. Anderson of 1972, the California Supreme Court in the United States found that, “the cruelty of capital punishment lies not only in the execution itself and the pain incident thereto, but also in the dehumanizing effects of the lengthy 131  See PC DEL/176/16, 16 February 2016, <http://www.osce.org/pc/223106?download=true>; PC DEL/81/16, 25 January 2016, <http://www.osce.org/pc/219861?download=true>; PC DEL/1685/15, 10 December 2015, <http://www.osce.org/pc/212921?download=true>; PC DEL/1670/15, 1 December 2015, <http://www.osce.org/ pc/205776?download=true>; PC DEL/1626/15, 24 November 2015, <http://www.osce.org/pc/205836?download=true>. 132  See PC. DEL/81/16, 25 January 2016, <http://www.osce.org/pc/219861?download=true>. 133  See PC DEL/246/16, 3 March 2016, <http://www.osce.org/pc/226546?download=true>. 134  Schabas, W. A. The Death Penalty as Cruel Treatment and Torture, Northeastern University Press, (Boston, 1996), pp. 3-206, see, p. 4. 135  Atkins vs. Virginia, op. cit. note 18. 136  United States Supreme Court, Robinson v. California, 370 US 660,666 (1962), <https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/370/660/case.html>. 137  U.S. Supreme Court, In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436 (1890), <https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/ us/136/436/case.html>; HRW, “So Long as They Die, Lethal injections in the United States”, 2006, <https://www. hrw.org/report/2006/04/23/so-long-they-die/lethal-injections-united-states>. 32