Victory for Death Penalty Opposition
Washington, DC.
The US Supreme Court today voted 5-4 to abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders. This marks the second consecutive victory handed down by the High Court in death penalty related cases; the last, a 2002 decision where mentally retarded offenders were also found not competent enough to be executed by the government.
Voting to strike down death penalty and bring our country in line with established laws in the rest of the world: Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Stevens, and Souter. Speaking for the majority, Justice Kennedy admitted, "the overwhelming weight of international opinion" was a leading cause for today's decision.
Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor, Thomas, and Scalia dissented. In an inflamed dissent, Justice Scalia disputed that a "national consensus" exists and said the majority opinion was based on the "flimsiest of grounds." The appropriateness of capital punishment should be determined by individual states, not "the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners".
This decision saves the lives of the 72 inmates sentenced to death for their crimes as children, 29 of them in the state of Texas alone. All current death sentences will be commuted to life in prison.
1999 saw the highest number of executions, 98, in the United States. The trend has been a consistently lower number each year. 2004 saw 59 total executions.
David Dow, an anti-death penalty lawyer at the University of Houston. When asked if he believed the end of the death sentence in America was near, Dow replied, ""Let me put it this way: I have a 4-year-old boy. By the time he's ready to go to law school, I don't think we'll have the death penalty any more."
In the current era of the death penalty in America, twenty-two people have been executed for crimes they committed while juveniles.
The US Supreme Court today voted 5-4 to abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders. This marks the second consecutive victory handed down by the High Court in death penalty related cases; the last, a 2002 decision where mentally retarded offenders were also found not competent enough to be executed by the government.
Voting to strike down death penalty and bring our country in line with established laws in the rest of the world: Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Stevens, and Souter. Speaking for the majority, Justice Kennedy admitted, "the overwhelming weight of international opinion" was a leading cause for today's decision.
Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor, Thomas, and Scalia dissented. In an inflamed dissent, Justice Scalia disputed that a "national consensus" exists and said the majority opinion was based on the "flimsiest of grounds." The appropriateness of capital punishment should be determined by individual states, not "the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners".
This decision saves the lives of the 72 inmates sentenced to death for their crimes as children, 29 of them in the state of Texas alone. All current death sentences will be commuted to life in prison.
1999 saw the highest number of executions, 98, in the United States. The trend has been a consistently lower number each year. 2004 saw 59 total executions.
David Dow, an anti-death penalty lawyer at the University of Houston. When asked if he believed the end of the death sentence in America was near, Dow replied, ""Let me put it this way: I have a 4-year-old boy. By the time he's ready to go to law school, I don't think we'll have the death penalty any more."
In the current era of the death penalty in America, twenty-two people have been executed for crimes they committed while juveniles.
posted by Unknown at 12:30 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home