Adam Cohen posts, "Stevens' Powerful Anti-Death-Penalty Views," at Time.
Justice Stevens is also troubled by the way key procedural rules have been rewritten to make it easier to put people to death. One change involves so-called death-qualified juries — that is, juries that don't include people who oppose the death penalty. In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that opposition to the death penalty is not a valid reason to exclude someone from a jury. If you allow jurors to be excluded on this basis, you end up with juries that are much more pro-prosecution, and pro–death penalty, than society as a whole. But three years ago, a bitterly divided Supreme Court undid that ruling — and cleared the way for death-qualified juries.
Another change is in the use of victim-impact statements. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that having a jury hear the often emotionally wrenching stories of victims could unfairly inflame jurors and was inconsistent with the "reasoned decisionmaking we require in capital cases." Four years later, after turnover among the Justices, the court reversed itself — over Justice Stevens' dissent — and ruled that these statements can be used.
Justice Stevens' critique of death-penalty law is exactly right. It is also badly needed, as the current court is becoming ever more enthusiastic about capital punishment and ever more indifferent to important details — like how certain we are that the person facing execution is even guilty.
And:
Justice Stevens' arguments are powerful precisely because they come from someone in the middle of the debate — a man who long believed capital punishment was constitutional provided it was properly applied. His sharp critique should reinforce the resolve of those who do not support the death penalty and raise unsettling questions for those who do.
"John Paul Stevens, William J. Brennan and the Death Penalty," is the title of Seth Stern's post at Huffington Post. Stern is the co-author of Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens made headlines this past weekend by explaining how he went from supporting capital punishment at the time he joined the U. S. Supreme Court to concluding it is unconstitutional.
One of Stevens' late colleagues, William J. Brennan Jr., might have felt some measure of vindication had he lived long enough to witness Stevens emerge as a forceful opponent of the death penalty. But it certainly wouldn't have surprised Brennan, who joined Thurgood Marshall as the Court's most ardent voices against capital punishment in the 1970s.
At the end of his 34-term career on the Supreme Court, Brennan confidently predicted to his clerks that both Stevens and Harry Blackmun would eventually come to view the death penalty as unconstitutional.
It is a prediction preserved in the narrative history of the 1989-90 term prepared by Brennan's law clerks at his direction. "Early in the Term, WJB had expressed his view that someday Blackmun (and somewhat less likely Stevens) would 'come around' to his view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment," Brennan's clerks wrote.
Stevens mentions Brennan in his new essay in the New York Review of Books, which lays out why he changed his position on the death penalty. Stevens blames conservative justices for engaging in "regrettable judicial activism" that he says undermined earlier decisions making it possible to carry out executions fairly.
Justice Steven's essay, "On the Death Sentence,"appears in the current New York Review of Books, and is noted here. Earlier coverage begins with this post.
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Posted by: Account Deleted | Wednesday, 29 December 2010 at 05:02 AM