Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) laid the groundwork for the eventual realization that capital punishment is unconstitutional, and it seems that he, like Justice Henry Blackmun in 1994, will no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.”
In a thorough, data-laden treatise, Justice Breyer explained why today’s death penalty likely violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. It is unreliable: More than 150 people sentenced to death since 1973 have been exonerated. It is arbitrary: Its application in any given case depends on factors like race or geography. Decades-long delays negate its claimed deterrent effect. And all but a very few jurisdictions have abandoned it.
All of these concerns, Justice Breyer wrote, are “quintessentially judicial matters” that demand the court’s attention. And yet his engagement with this important topic drew a one-word summation from Justice Antonin Scalia: “gobbledygook.” He mocked Justice Breyer’s challenges as having been voiced for years by death-penalty abolitionists. It did not seem to occur to Justice Scalia that the same issues surface again and again because the problem lies with capital punishment itself.
Unreliable, arbitrary, and no deterrent to crime. Obviously, the conservatives love it.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/122846728017
