Supreme Court Upholds Oklahoma’s Three-Drug Execution Protocol
The decision seems pretty narrow, inviting further litigation down the road. Still, a reminder that Roberts and Kennedy often vote in a manner consistent with judicial conservatism, unlike the liberal bloc that always votes in lockstep.
Not to worry. I feel confident that the precedents written by Anthony Kennedy will be used to find the death penalty unconstitutional one day, probably in my lifetime. Evolving standards gonna evolve.
Ding.
Patterico (3cc0c1) — 6/29/2015 @ 7:44 amIt would be a wild world in which the same court that discovered a “right” to an abortion would find that the state cannot execute a truly heinous criminal.
JVW (8278a3) — 6/29/2015 @ 1:30 pmBabies – oops I mean Fetuses can feel pain at approx 20 weeks definitely at 26 weeks. Maybe we Maybe a state should pass a law that the fetus is given a coma inducing drug before the abortion.
Do you think that Breyer/ Ginsburg/Sotomayer/Kagan would recognize the insult to their intellegience.
joe (debac0) — 6/29/2015 @ 1:43 pmI disagree, moving the requirement that the offender carries the entire burden in such cases from a four justice plurality to a five justice holding is far from a narrow decision. It will be interesting to see if the district court overseeing the California litigation shows that any respect but I am guessing not.
Soronel Haetir (86a46e) — 6/29/2015 @ 5:43 pmWe need to abolish the Eighth Amendment.
Michael Ejercito (d9a893) — 6/29/2015 @ 5:51 pmooph, the Justices really got personal in their write-ups. I’m surprised that no one vetted them out. Does anyone here understand (not agree, just understand) how Justice Beyer was trying to prove that all death penalties are un-constitutional?
seeRpea (0cf003) — 6/29/2015 @ 11:00 pmJoe asked:
This question assumes facts not in evidence, that said Justices actually have intelligence.
The brutally honest Dana (f6a568) — 6/30/2015 @ 6:31 amIf the Court had invalidated the use of this drug in executions, then there’d have been no recourse except to use the method of execution most common when the Eighth Amendment was ratified, and thus obviously approved of by the Framers: hanging.
If we are going to have executions, then we shouldn’t be squeamish about them: they should be public, and they should be violent, hangings in the town square. Instead, those who support capital punishment have hidden them away, in closed rooms, out of sight of almost everybody, and moved away from quick but still violent methods to trying to put criminals to sleep like unwanted puppies.
Where is the deterrent value in that? Heck, I can’t even see where society is saying that murderers have done something really, really terrible when they burn and dismember their victims, torturing them to death, by putting them to sleep quietly.
The Dana opposed to capital punishment (f6a568) — 6/30/2015 @ 6:37 amWell, if any murderer ever asks to be publicly hanged, burned and dismembered, I think we should grant him his wish, Dana.
nk (dbc370) — 6/30/2015 @ 6:41 amBut I would outsource executions to Iran, as part of the nuclear deal. We could pay them the hangman’s fee in Thorium.
nk (dbc370) — 6/30/2015 @ 6:43 amSorry Dana, there are plenty of other means than hanging although hanging ain’t bad. BTW, “we” aren’t squeamish about executions. The wussyfied, girly boys cranked out from leftist propaganda mills for the last hundred years are. Execution, like man/woman marriage is as old as civilization. It’s only recently that killing a person who needed killing became somehow wrong. Somewhere between jay walking and mass murder there is a point where society has the legal, moral, ethical and religious right to demand execution. That extreme decision shouldn’t be taken lightly but it shouldn’t be excluded either.
I don’t believe execution was ever meant as a deterrent for crimes. Imprisonment may be a deterrent but sometimes not enough so we move to execution. It’s a punishment meant to give closure to the victims and their families and administer justice in the eyes of the law and society, not to deter. Executions designed with enough ruthless bloodshed to be a deterrent would not be acceptable to the leftist run society. Unless a conservative were being executed then all bets are off.
Rev. Barack Hussein Hoagie (f4eb27) — 6/30/2015 @ 7:03 amYour response assumes facts not in evidence , tthat said justices are intellectually honest.
joe (debac0) — 6/30/2015 @ 7:12 amI also noticed that several opinions got personal this time – starting with Din, Zinosky (sp).
joe (debac0) — 6/30/2015 @ 7:18 amBased on the number of personal critisism in the early opinions, I expected a lot of Ad Hoc constituional opinions (AD Hoc – unsupported by any reasonable interpretation of the constitution).