Justice Stevens renounces capital punishment......

[nhboy]

After a 32-year journey, Justice Stevens renounces capital punishment"

"WASHINGTON: When Justice John Paul Stevens intervened in a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday to score a few points off the lawyer who was defending the death penalty for the rape of a child, the courtroom audience saw a master strategist at work, fully in command of the flow of the argument and the smallest details of the case. For those accustomed to watching Stevens, it was a familiar sight.

But there was something different that no one in the room knew except the eight other justices. In the decision issued 30 minutes earlier in which the court found Kentucky's method of execution by lethal injection constitutional, John Paul Stevens, in the 33rd year of his Supreme Court tenure and four days shy of his 88th birthday, had just renounced the death penalty."

After a 32-year journey, Justice Stevens renounces capital punishment - International Herald Tribune

 

[ImnoMensa]

Stevens had remained silent during that first half of the argument, but now he pounced. "Could you clarify?" he began, interrupting the state's lawyer, Juliet Clark. "Were those injuries permanent?"

Perhaps the injuries the child received did heal physically, but have the mental wounds healed and are they permanent? The death penalty is a permanent penalty for the guilty , there is no doubt of that. The one thing it assures is that this person will never harm another individual.

IMO the only good argument against the death penalty is the guilt or innocence of the party to receive the penalty. If there is a shadow of a doubt between guilt or innocence that person must not die. When there is no doubt, stop torturing the guilty party with appeals and delays and get the job done.

 

[Larry Gude]

The primary...

...points;

But outside the confines of the Kentucky case, he said, the time had come to reconsider "the justification for the death penalty itself."

Obviously, an horrific thing you can do to a person is take their life unjustly, therefore, taking the life of a person who has murdered is just.

Next;

He wrote that court decisions and actions taken by states to justify the death penalty were "the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process" to weigh the costs and risks of the penalty against its benefits.

Any sanction provided for must, must be the the result of an acceptable deliberative process. So, the focus is not on the justification; it is just. Therefore, if deliberation is lacking, that should be the focus.

Next:

During the child rape argument on Wednesday, it was the lawyer for Louisiana who was giving the vivid description of the crime, recounting in grisly anatomic detail the injuries inflicted on an 8-year-old girl by her stepfather, the convicted rapist challenging the state's death penalty law. As justices and the courtroom audience cringed, the air seemed to leave the room, along with any points the defendant's lawyer had managed to make in his initial turn at the lectern.

...to which Stephens asked;

"Were those injuries permanent?"

That is besides the point. Any injury heals. Stephens is leaving the argument here.

In his opinion on Wednesday, Stevens said the Uttecht decision was "of special concern to me," and used it to explain his journey from Jurek v. Texas to Baze v. Rees. Those who voted to uphold the death penalty in 1976, he said, "relied heavily on our belief that adequate procedures were in place" to treat death penalty cases with special care so as to minimize bias and error.

Again, that has nothing to do with the death penalty.