Death Penalty
Posted at 5:44pm on Jun. 25, 2008 Gov. Bobby Jindal Signs Bill to Chemically Castrate Sex Offenders
Not Even Slightly Veiled Translation: Hey SCOTUS, Suck It
By Ben Domenech
On the heels of today's SCOTUS decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana barring the death penalty for sex offenders, Gov. Bobby Jindal released a statement calling the ruling an "affront to the people of Louisiana" - and what's more, vowing to do whatever possible to amend the state’s laws in order to maintain the death penalty for child rape.
But that's not all he did.
Today, Gov. Jindal signed the "Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill," authorizing the castration of convicted sex offenders. They get a choice: physical or chemical. Oh, and they don't just get castrated and leave - they still have to serve out their sentence.
More below the fold:
Posted in Bobby Jindal | Breaking News | Crime | Death Penalty | Louisiana | scotus — Comments (51)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 11:07am on Jun. 25, 2008 Justice Kennedy strikes down the DP for child rapists
By Feddie
As someone who opposes the death penalty in all instances, and who also believes that death is too good for any rapist (put his sorry a*s on a Cool-Hand-Luke-style chain gang for life, I say), I obviously favor the outcome in this case. That having been said, Justice Kennedy's "reasoning," as usual, is beyond pathetic. The Court's opinion today in Kennedy v. Louisiana, as in Roper v. Simmons, is a constitutional abomination. In an nutshell, there is simply no basis in the Constitution's text, history, or structure for the Court's decision (which rests instead on the Court's own "independent judgment" and "evolving standards of decency"). It is nothing less than rule by judicial fiat.
At some point, the American people are going to have to decide whether they wish to be ruled by nine (and in many cases five) unelected philosopher kings, or whether they would rather have the most contentious issues of public policy we face as a people hashed out in the legislative arena (as was envisioned by our founders/framers).
I, for one, favor the latter.
Posted in Death Penalty | Law — Comments (7)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 5:53pm on Jan. 4, 2008 Supreme Court To Decide Eighth Amendment Issue [comments open]
By Dan McLaughlin
Some of you may remember my post about the cert petition in Kennedy v. Louisiana, and the question of whether the "evolving national consensus" theory of the Eighth Amendment only goes in one direction - that is, if it's true that the action of some states to ban a punishment in a particular context (here, the death penalty for child rape) transmutes that punishment into a "cruel and unusual" one for constitutional purposes where it was not before, is it also true that more states adding that punishment can make it not cruel and unusual?
Well, today the Court granted cert in Kennedy, so the Court will be faced with that question, among others.
Posted at 11:23am on Nov. 16, 2007 Take This Evolving National Consensus And Shove It
Geese and Ganders
By Dan McLaughlin
SCOTUSBlog notes that the State of Louisiana - in opposing a certiorari petition - is pointing to a trend of adding child rape to the list of capital crimes as a basis for finding that it's not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to execute a man who raped his 8-year-old stepdaughter:
The state said that the Court, if it agrees to hear the case, should focus not only on how many states treat rape of a child as a capital crime, but also on a trend toward applying the death sentence to more crimes where the victim is not killed. Five states, like Louisiana, now have capital punishment for child rape, all enacted since 1997 with the most recent, in Texas, in 2007.
Moving beyond that specific crime, the state’s brief said, 15 out of the 38 states and the federal government – 41 percent of the jurisdictions, it notes — "authorize some form of non-homicide capital punishment." That includes treason, espionage, aircraft piracy, aggravated kidnapping, and some drug trafficking crimes.
"The trend toward capitalization of non-homicide crimes, child rape in particular, is significant," the state asserted. "Six states have now enacted the death penalty for child rape after this Court [in Coker v. Georgia, 1977] held that the death penalty for rape of an adult woman was unconstitutional."
This argument puts the Court's liberals and swing vote Justice Kennedy to the test to see if they actually mean what they say.
Read On...
Posted in Death Penalty | Supreme Court | The Courts — Comments (18)/ Email this page » / Read More »
