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Obama Supports Death Penalty for Child Rape
Democrat Barack Obama says he disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision outlawing executions of people convicted of raping a child.
Obama told reporters Wednesday that he thinks the rape of a child, ages six or eight, is a heinous crime. He said if a state makes a decision, then the death penalty is potentially applicable.What legal principle does that fall under I wonder?
Update II: From SCOTUSblog's analysis of the ruling:
On Wednesday, in Kennedy v. Louisiana (07-343), the Court’s five-Justice majority said at one point: “When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint.” For a Court not yet ready to end the long-running constitutional experiment with the death penalty, it was a revealing utterance of near-revulsion at the process.
Back on April 16, in a separate opinion in Baze v. Rees (07-5439), Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that he had reached “the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extraction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or political purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the state [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.’ “ With that, a fourth Justice in the nation’s history — after William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun — converted to the abolitionist side on capital punishment.
The first of those two statements is clear evidence that the Court, at least as presently constituted, is determined not to “extend” or “expand” the reach of the death penalty (the use of the words “extend” and “expand” prompted some of the dissenting Justices’ most critical responses Wednesday). And the second of those statements suggests, once more, that the longer a Justice stays on the Court and watches capital cases come and go, the greater the prospect that capital punishment will lose another vote and there will be an internal voice reinforcing any other Justice’s hesitancy.
That does not mean, however, that the Court will routinely stop executions. Since its ruling in Baze, it has repeatedly declined to step in to block a scheduled execution. And even Justice Stevens has not dissented from those orders. But there is a definite trend line: following nullification of the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman (Coker v. Georgia, 1977, for murder by a mentally impaired individual (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002), and murder by a minor (Roper v. Simmons, 2005), the options for using the death penalty continue to narrow.For me, that's a rare bit of good news from the Court. Apparently, mileage varies pretty widely on that among liberals these days.
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