Raping a child is cruel and unusual. Executing a child rapist is not. In fact, the natural impulse of people cross culturally is to execute such malefactors. The U.S. Supreme Court today forbade states from executing child rapists. Court liberals, with Anthony Kennedy providing the swing vote, uniformly voted to ban capital punishment for crimes other than murder. Kennedy and the NAMBLA wing of the court deemed such executions as "cruel and unusual" and an affront to "evolving standards of decency." The specific case in question involved a stepfather raping an eight-year-old girl, with the injuries sustained in the attack requiring surgery. While people can disagree on the justice of employing capital punishment for this or any other case, why is an unelected body judging a case by "evolving standards" rather than the fixed words of the Constitution?

My, my. We have "evolved" a long way when the best deterent to horse thievery was hanging.

I am against capital punishment in general, as I believe it fails as a deterrent in current practice.

However, Dan, I agree. This is one crime that BEGS for the death penalty. Soon we will be subjecting child molesters to hours of taxpayer funded "counseling" since, you know, society made them this way, it isn't their fault and other piles of bovine excrement.

Be well.

Sponge

Lawmakers are assuming criminals are legal scholars. They are assuming when a horny bastard picks up a child to rape, he knows he may be subject to death penalty. They think it's more heinous when a horny bastard sticks his prick into a child's sexual organ than if he stuck a 10 inch knife into the child's abdomen. How they figured that out is beyond me.

So this is where we are in 2008, "evolving standards of decency."

Why don't we just abolish all laws and then we'd have no need for punishment. Would we then not be truly "evolved"?

What is wrong with people?

This sickens me. He might as well have murdered this innocent child! He murdered her innocence, murdered her trust, murdered her childhood, murdered her chances at a productive adult relationship, and murdered her dignity; the only thing he didn’t murder was her physical body.

Tyranny. Sigh.

Somewhere, Michael Jackson is celebrating.

Get their rationale -- it is unconstitutional for Louisiana to execute repeated child rapists BECAUSE most states don`t execute for crimes that don`t involve death of the victim. So much for federalism or local jurisdiction the right of a community to govern itself.

Skeptic: wtf? Could you make your point a little less disgustingly and a little more clearly?

Judge Kennedy writes "there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape."

Oh well, at least the definition of marriage should be safe then. right?

very sad indeed.

xantippe,

Welcome to the post-Sullivan world, where they decided that judges can tell us what is popular or not. They can run around gathering all the popular outcomes and kludge it into a "vote" based on "evolving standards of decency".

Btw,

Expect more tyrannical jurisprudence tomorrow (later today) when the SCOTUS decided to uphold the blatantly unconstitutional DC gun ban.

Criminal law is about Deterrance, Incapacitation, Rehabilitation, and Retribution. The Death Penalty is the ultimate Deterrance in our legal system. It should be reserved for the most heinous of crimes.

We need to reserve the death penalty for the rape and murder of a child. I concede that child rape is a heinous crime, but raping and murdering the child is even worse. If we extend our ultimate penalty for the rape of a child, we can not longer deter the rape and murder of a child effectively. If the child rapist would receive the death penalty for the rape of a child, what remainder deterrance is there for the rapist to not murder the child? We need to reserve the death penalty for the rape and murder of a child to reserve our deterrance ability.

It is sad, but it is reality. By not extending the death penalty to the rape of a child, we may in effect be saving the child's life.

My Vo,

I'm glad that you and five justices feel they can solve the problem for everybody else.

There are policies that I would like to see implemented because I have decent arguments for them, but democracy kinda gets in the way of my perfect world.

I second Sea King. My Vo makes a fine prudential case for being careful about how one applies teh death penalty b/c of possibly encouraging "witness murder." This is particularly true with the manifestly unjust "3 strikes laws" that impose lifetime imprisonment for the 3rd crime. My view is just put the scum away for life or execute them w/o making it known to criminals in advance that this is a mandated ruling.

But anyway I second Sea King b/c My Vo's point is completely unrelated to the issue here as this SCOTUS ruling was completely tyrannical procedurally and is null and void prima facie.