Whether Joseph Garcia's extended stay on Texas' death row for nearly 16 years has resulted in his suffering additional severe psychological stress that exceeds the punishment of death determined by the jury and amounts to an additional punishment that the Court should find proscribed by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments

QUESTIONS PRESENTED In In re Davis, 180 S. Ct. 1 (2009), this Court transferred a death row prisonex’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus to the district court “for hearing and determination” of a late claim of actual innocence that might have barred Davis’ execution. Although the Court had not previously recognized a right not to be executed if actually innocent, see House v. Bell, 547 U.S. 518, 554 (2006); Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 890, 411-12, 417 (1998), its decision in Davis signaled that the time was right to consider a claim that had long percolated in the state and federal courts. Similarly, a claim that excessive stays on death row might violate the Highth and Fourteenth Amendments has been recognized by individual justices of the Court for a period that spans more than two decades, see Lackey v. Texas, 514 U.S. 1045, 115 S. Ct. 1422 (1995) (em.) (Stevens, J, respecting the denial of certiorari); Glossip v. Gross, 135 S. Ct. 2726, 2764 (2015) (Breyer, J., dissenting), but has not been addressed in a holding of the Court. The questions presented are: 1. Whether Joseph Garcia’s extended stay on Texas’ death row for nearly 16 years has resulted in his suffering additional severe psychological stress that exceeds the punishment of death determined by the jury and imposed by the trial court, and amounts to an additional punishment that the Court should find proscribed by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments; and, 2. Whether Mr. Garcia is actually innocent of the death penalty, as that term is defined in Sawyer v. Whitley, 505 U.S. 333, 348 (1992), because his excessively-long incarceration, with extreme deprivation on Texas’ death row, makes him part of a class of offenders whose executions should be circumscribed by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and renders him not eligible for a sentence of death. i