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I think it is a barbaric response that serves no real purpose. It doesn't deter anyone, it is very expensive, it can mean killing an innocent person.

I understand the gut response of vindictiveness, but I don't think it helps make fair decisions.

If you're a good Christian and you believe all that mumbo jumbo they teach us in church, then a wrongfully convicted person who is executed will certainly sit on the right hand of the Father, no? Think of the perks s/he will receive in that magical place up in the clouds!

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with the handle "iggle" be a conservative?

He was appointed by Reagan.

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POS got daily.

One more Alito or Roberts, and we're done.

In my Daniel Day-Lewis "Last of the Mohicans" voice: "Justice Stevens .... stay alive!!! Whatever you have to do, .... stay alive!!!"

I've been involved in 7 death penalty cases, and for the past 13 years, have been appellate counsel for 2 guys still on death row.

There is a huge difference between life imprisonment and strapping a guy to gurney and putting him down like a rabid dog. The process for which we decide who gets executed, and who doesn't, is grossly disparate from state to state, case to case, and the deck is heavily stacked against the accused.

The appellate courts and the US Supreme Court are very familiar with the unfairness aspects, that stem from homicide cases.

Part of the rationale in limiting the death penalty to homicide cases, is a recognition of the Court that the mass mob mentality jumps out in child rape cases, which are the the most likely type of case for an innocent person to be convicted, as all it takes it some child saying "he made me suck his penis". No physical proof ... no nothing. Just a prosecutor with the powerful argument, "why would the child make such a thing up?"

Had the Court gone the other way, appellate courts would be forever swamped litigating a slew of death penalty cases, and the state legislatures would forever be involved in a game of deuling banjos, expanding the death penalty to robbery, drug dealing, DUI's, and every other crime on the food chain.

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... if a President McCain threw the conservative base a bone, by putting a ultra conservative on the bench, the above mentioned 5, who often make up the 5-4 decisions (as in the child rape case), would now just be 4, and the 5-4 decisions would go the other way.

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So I completely agree with the decision. I do not believe in the death penalty. I do not think it is a deterrant and in many cases I think it let's the prisoner off easy. I use Timothy McVeigh as an example. Why does he get to decide that he's done with appeals and wants to just die. Not his call. I say lock him in a closet for the rest of his life and let him think about what he did.
Better question - Why did the 4 Catholic Justices vote in favor of expanding the death penalty when the Church cleary (per Evangelium Vitae) says that the US should not have the death penalty?

Convince me it is a deterrent, and we can talk.

But I do acknowledge that the death penalty permissible under the Constitution.

No executed prisoner has ever murdered or raped again.

like you said earlier, times have changed. In the case of child rapists, they deserve to suffer. They should be put through the most excruciating pain imaginable to man. I believe in the laws of this great country, but child rape is the lowest of the low.

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My definition of child rape is sexual abuse that occurs between a child and an adult which results in the sexual penetration.

Domer:

This is my second response to your post. I know that my question sounds really stupid but it presents a major problem. In my state a child under sixteen years of age can not give consent to sexual activity. Therefore all sex with a child is non consensual and therefore some sort of rape.

We have little problem defining rape of an adult, it is forced and unwanted sex. Is a four year old child raped when a pedophile works his way into that child's house and then penetrates the child's vagina with his penis? Does that deserve the death penalty? Should that be treated differently than someone who kidnaps the child and does the same thing? Should a household member be put to death who digitally penetrates the child's vagina? Should the penalty be different depending on the child's age?

The easy answer is yes to all but we would have pedophiles stacked like cord wood going through the appellate process. This issue creates lots of questions but not so many answers.

Tom

...Louisiana, perhaps as a result of the ruling, voted to allow castration for such offenders. This includes the possibility of actual castration, and not just chemical castration.

Hooray for Louisiana.

We don't tolerate that kind of nonsense down here.

is!

Domer:

Personally I favor Capitol Punishment. People have a hard time conceiving how horrible the murders are and how despicable the Defendants are. Having said that, there are real problems with the Death Penalty.

In New Mexico we only have two Defendants on Death Row, both of them from San Juan County and both of them Anglos. I preside over one of those cases and I therefore can not discuss the details of that case. The point is that there is a major difference between how cases are prosecuted. We have had aggressive District Attorneys and or County is very conservative. We have had three Death Penalty cases go to trial in the last several years which is probably three times more than the number of Death Penalty cases brought in the entire state of New Mexico in the same time frame. So, there is a disproportion between how Defendants are being prosecuted.

Death Penalty Cases and their appeals are incredibly expensive. The State has spent more than half a million dollars on the case before me and it is back before the New Mexico Supreme Court for a second time.

I predict that within the next five years the Death Penalty will be unconstitutional, period. In the case of child rapists they have not executed a Defendant for such a crime in 40 years.

Tom

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It's the Constitutional Law equivalent of asking WWJD. Except that, in the case of the Founding Fathers, their track record is somewhat more spotty than Mr. Christ's. What would the Founding Fathers do? Count black men as 4/5 of a white man for starters....

Constitution that was written by our founding fathers. Tom mentioned that the Supreme Court will possibly make Capital Punishment unconstitutional. How is that possible?

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Like you, most liberal scum opine that life imprisonment is actually worse than being put to death. If so, then isn't the life sentence cruel and unusual if it's to be considered worse than death?

Hammer:

Under our Constitution and the 14th Amendment the Supreme Court has the ultimate right to declare a law unconstitutional. They have that right for various reasons but one of them is to conform the laws to the norms of society. There were times when men owned slaves, women couldn't vote and African Americans went to segregated schools. Times change and so does the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution. Just as segregation was the norm in the first half of the twentieth century that was found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Tom

The three examples you gave were of anachronisms that were abolished by amending the Constitution, not judicial fiat. The Supreme Court does not have the power to amend the Constitution; they have the power to interpret it. And it would go against shitloads of prior SC interpretations to find the death penalty impermissible.

NDFan:

It has been 45 years since that decision but I assumed everyone was familiar with it. I prior decision held that separate but equal schools were equal. In Brown Vs The Board the Supreme Court held that separate but equal was inherently unequal. They turned education upside down, especially in the south. They were reflecting the mindset of most of the people in this country.

Just last week they held that the Death Penalty for non lethal crimes was cruel and unusual contrary to our Bill of Rights. If they can do that they can hold that the Death Penalty itself is cruel and unusual punishment. If they do, who are you going to appeal to.

Tom

And I dropped the ball on that one, but the other two required a constitutional amendment. Further, Brown was consistent with the language of the 14th Amendment and rectified a terrible decision made by a Court that was unwilling to go as far as the American people had in amending the Constitution.

Suddenly realizing that the death penalty is not permitted under our Constitution after over 200 years of contrary jurisiprudence would be nothing short of judicial fiat. If the American people want to determine that the death penalty is antiquated, they can do so. However, until they do, it is not up to the Court to do so in light of what other countries are doing.

We still get to make our own laws in this country!

I am glad it did so. But that decision was as much of an activist decision of the Supreme Court as any there have been...Roe v. Wade included.

In fact, the righteousness and virtue of Brown v. Board is what probably gives license to sitting justices to continue to engage in judicial activism.

Unlike Starr, I don't bemoan Brown v. Board. I'm not so anal retentive as to think that, even in the most exceptional cases, there's no call for the Supreme Court to step outside its traditional role and carve up the fabric of the nation. Marbury v. Madison is probably another example of the Supreme Court being uppity.

It's not like the Executive Branch isn't ever guilty of activism that goes beyond its traditional province. The White House regularly exceeds its domain by issuing signing statements that carve out exceptions to laws that don't appear in the bills that the President signs into law. And the whole question of how we go to war...well, if people are going to get pissed off over separation of powers and branches of government not clewing tightly to the letter of the Constitution, forget about the decisions of an activist court and focus on something that's really worth getting upset about.

I submit to you, Brown v. Bd. of Education, as Exhibit A in the case in favor of why it's actually okay for the Supreme Court to ignore longstanding jurisprudence and take the bull by the horns and do what the politicians and the American public-at-large have exhibited little stomach for doing of their own volition.

I'm not saying that I win that argument on the basis of Brown v. Bd. of Education. It's just one exhibit. But I will say this much: I don't think someone who believes that the Supreme Court should NEVER superlegislate can look at Brown v. Board of Education and admire it as brilliant jurisprudence.

Strictly for purposes of the point you're making -- that the Court should never overstep its bounds -- I believe that Brown and Roe and Bush v. Gore are probably the three worst decisions in modern times.

We're just blinded by the vastly beneficial and redemptive historic repercussions of Brown to think of it as being profoundly activist in nature. Or maybe we're too afraid that a condemnation of Brown v. Board puts us in with some pathetic, if not despicable, company.

But if you erase all the history since Brown and put yourself back to May 18, 1954 -- reading the paper the day after the decision was issued -- it's actually not so difficult to see how plenty of Americans of good will could still decry that decision at the time without being racist or bigoted.

What that court did was so over-the-top crazy, it was not only contemptible for its overreaching...it was extraordinary for the vision (or sheer luck?) that those justices held for America in the wake of a decision that, by all rights, they should never have set forth if they had rigidly adhered to their oath and didn't let their collective conscience impel them to do instead what was right and best and wise.

I think the nation is disserved by numerous 5-4 activist decisions. If you're going to have an activist decision, it should be for that rare, historic case and it ought to be 9-0 -- or perhaps 8-1 to allow for that one curmudgeonly justice who refuses to do what's just and wise because he won't budge even if it will mean he winds up on the wrong side of history.

Maybe, in the case of the death penalty, it's not enough to say that the Court shouldn't ban it because that would be superlegislating. If there are other reasons to keep it, then fine. But I can see the death penalty being precisely the kind of decision where the court should exercise its license to superlegislate. And if the only reason for exercising restraint is to exercise restraint, that's just way too anal retentive for me.

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While I oppose capital punishment, I concede that it is constitutional. Since both the 5th and the 14th Amendments reference the circumstances under which one may be deprived of life (and liberty and property), how can capital punishemnt be declared unconstitutional?

I will address the proportionality issue.
Even though I am opposed to the death penalty, in my opinion the proportionality argument does not make sense when applied to sexual abuse of a child, murder for hire, murder by torture, and probably some other stuff if I gave it some thought. The preceding is off the top of my head.
The version of the Model Penal Code that was in effect when I was in law school provided for the death penalty for the things I mentioned, as well as murder by ambush and by poisoning.
The proportionality ("punishment fits the crime") argument prohibits the death penalty for property crimes, drug crimes, "minor" violent crimes. I think the rape of a child is as horrible as it gets.

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child rapists? I'm thinking you're for execution for this heinous crime, but I could be mistaken.

Should be dropped from an airplane from above thirty five thousand feet, hand cuffed shackled without a chute, over Antarctica. So that their last thoughts are of the freezing cold landing they are about to endure, and was it worth it.

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but he hasn't been convicted in a court of law.

It was one of the darker Webster episodes.

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