The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who rapes a child, but left open the possibility of the death penalty for murderers and crimes against the state, i.e. treason.
If it’s still optional for crimes against the state, Bill Clinton and Al Gore should have been executed after giving classified technology to Chinese and Indonesian intelligence agents and arms merchants. I guess that particular aspect of treason is subject to interpretation.
The case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, No. 07-343, was an appeal by one of the two Louisiana inmates, Patrick Kennedy. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter, whose injuries were severe enough to require emergency surgery. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Mr. Kennedy’s conviction and rejected his challenge to the constitutionality of his sentence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/washington/26scotuscnd.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1214492841-tZwYE4uZQU55U1e1P/GHhg
“There is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and nonhomicide crimes against individual persons, even including child rape, on the other,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in what will be a term-defining decision for the court.
While the latter may be “devastating in their harm,” Kennedy said, “they cannot be compared to murder in their severity and irrevocability.” He was joined by the court’s more liberal members: John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.
Though capital punishment can be imposed for crimes against the state, such as treason, espionage and terrorism, of the 3,300 inmates on death row nationwide, only two face execution for a crime other than murder. Both were convicted under the Louisiana law in question, which authorized the death penalty for anyone who rapes a child younger than 12.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. questioned the majority’s logic that every murderer sentenced to death is more “morally depraved” than any child-rapist.
“I have little doubt that, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists — predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children — are the epitome of moral depravity,” he wrote. Alito was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.
I wonder if that idiot Anthony Kennedy has any daughters. What would he think if this had happened to one of his children?
An exerpt from Anthony Kennedy’s own majority opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana, decided June 25, 2008:
L. H. was transported to the Children’s Hospital. An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that L. H.’s injuries were the most severe he had seen from a sexual assault in his four years of practice. A laceration to the left wall of the vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into the vaginal structure. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette to the anus. The injuries required emergency surgery.
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/07-343.pdf
For the leftwingnuts sitting on the Supreme Court, such a cruel, depraved atrocity doesn’t warrant taking this waste of skin to the place he earned on death row.
What makes this all the more sickening is Anthony Kennedy’s assertion that these sorts of rape ‘cannot be compared to murder in their severity and irrevocability’. After all the damage that was done to that child, her death would have been the only mitigating factor in the mind of this shit-for-brains Justice?
Patrick Kennedy, the child raping scumbag in this case, should have been taken out behind the courthouse, castrated, and put to a slow, agonizing, painful death.
THAT would be justice.