Black robes and betrayal
Tony Blankley
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March 2,
2005
The United States Supreme Court has struck again -- this
time overturning by a 5-4 decision, all statutes that apply
the death sentence to 16- and 17 year old murderers.
As a former prosecutor I am convinced that from time to
time juries find before them 16- or 17-year-old defendants who
understand full well the vicious nature of their murders and
deserve -- after receiving the full panoply of due process --
to be fried, gassed, hanged, shot, injected or otherwise sent
promptly to hell.
Even if you are of a sympathetic nature and believe that
the little 17-year-old darlings deserve to be rehabilitated,
you might still find this Supreme Court opinion stomach
turning for its sheer disdain of logic, public attitudes and
American law.
But first: The crime, as described yesterday by Justice
Kennedy in Roper v. Simmons, writing for the majority:
At the age of 17, when he was still a junior in high
school, Christopher Simmons ... committed murder ... There
is little doubt that Simmons was the instigator of the
crime. Before its commission, Simmons said he wanted to
murder someone. In chilling, callous terms he talked about
his plan with his friends ... Simmons proposed to commit
burglary and murder by breaking and entering, tying up a
victim and throwing the victim off a bridge. Simmons assured
his friends they could "get away with it" because they were
minors.
A few hours later, he proceeded to do just that, breaking
into a home, covering the victim's head in a towel, wrapping
her up in duct tape and tying her hands and legs together with
electrical wire. Then he drove her to a bridge and threw her
off into the water, where helpless, she drowned.
The question before the Supreme Court was whether this
presented a case of cruel and unusual punishment in violation
of the 8th Amendment to our Constitution. No, the court was
not concerned with whether being assaulted in your home,
wrapped in a towel, duct tape and electrical wire, and thrown
off a bridge was cruel and unusual punishment. That's OK. The
Court is only concerned with whether it was cruel and unusual
to execute the strapping 17-year-old murderer who did it.
The gist of the majority's analysis is that whether the
crime is constitutionally "unusual" depends on whether
"evolving standards of decency" have reached the point in our
history when such punishment has been clearly rejected by
society.
It happens that only 15 years ago, the Supreme Court found
that the kind of statute in question was constitutional. But,
rather than overturning that case, yesterday, the court found
that in the last 15 years, a national consensus against such
punishment had emerged.
The majority based that conclusion on the fact that "18
states -- or 47 percent of states that permit capital
punishment -- now have legislation prohibiting the execution
of offenders under 18," and four of those states have adopted
such legislation since the Supreme Court's ruling of 15 years
ago.
As Justice Anton Scalia fumed in his dissent: "Words have
no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death
penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our
previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a
challenged practice, generally over a long period of time." In
this case, a majority of relevant states approve the practice.
Recognizing that they were arguing a rather weak set of
facts regarding a national consensus, the majority
supplemented its argument with the self-aggrandizing assertion
that "In the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on
the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under
the Eighth Amendment." Outrageously, the court asserts such
power because, as Justice Scalia characterized, "juries cannot
be trusted with the delicate task of weighing a defendant's
youth along with other mitigating factors." This assertion, of
course, undermines "the very foundations of our capital
sentencing system."
The majority, still sensing its arguments to be rather
feeble, went on to try to buttress their case further by
citing a menagerie of international treaties and foreign laws,
claiming: "The opinion of the world community, while not
controlling our outcome, does provide respected and
significant confirmation for our own conclusions."
In support thereof they cited, inter alia, the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty before signing
which the United States Government expressly reserved "the
right ... to impose capital punishment on any person (other
than a pregnant woman) ... "
Source:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/tonyblankley/tb20050302.shtml
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