John Paul Stevens, currently the most senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, yesterday ventilated his opinion on the entire system of capital punishment. The 87-year-old Stevens called on states to stop lethal executions entirely.

Expressing his opinion Wednesday, Stevens wrote that it was a "pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes."

Stevens said, the current attempts to "retain the death penalty as part of our law" are the "product of habit and inattention, rather than an acceptable deliberative process".

Stevens' viewpoint came to light when the court including Stevens upheld Kentucky's lethal injection protocol in a 7-2 decision, which called on for the constitutional bar for administering the three-drug cocktail used for lethal injections in California and more than 30 other states.

The Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection, pronouncing that it posed an unconstitutional risk that a condemned inmate would suffer acute yet undetectable pain.

The 7-2 decision in a Kentucky case prompted Virginia to quickly lift its moratorium. However, Oklahoma and Mississippi officials pledged to resume executions. Since the justices took up the case in September, dozens of executions have been delayed around the country. Of the 37 states with the death penalty, only Nebraska does not use lethal injection as its sole or primary method.