Posted on 07/02/2008 6:26:26 AM PDT by shrinkermd
When the Supreme Court ruled last week that the death penalty for raping a child was unconstitutional, the majority noted that a child rapist could face the ultimate penalty in only six states — not in any of the 30 other states that have the death penalty, and not under the jurisdiction of the federal government either.
This inventory of jurisdictions was a central part of the court’s analysis, the foundation for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s conclusion in his majority opinion that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied.
It turns out that Justice Kennedy’s confident assertion about the absence of federal law was wrong.
A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The “Gang of Nine” must have some pretty sorry law clerks working for them right now.
It significantly undercuts the precedential value of this decision, I think and the petitioner should file and the Court grant a motion for reconsideration based on a meaningful factual error .
Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter and Breyer are meaningfulfactual errors.
I find it very suprising that nobody ever pointed this out (or aparently was aware of it) during the entirety of the preceedings. Despite the meaningful error though, I’d say there a 3-4 % chance that someone in the majority would flip and vote to reconsider.
“This inventory of jurisdictions was a central part of the court’s analysis, the foundation for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s conclusion in his majority opinion that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied.
One minor typo in the above.
“..capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “DEvolving standards of decency”.
That fixes it.
I’m shoving the phrase
“evolving standards of decency in a maturing society”
in every lib’s face that I encounter, especially when there is some story of the devolving society caused by some liberal policy.
Yeah, we’ve “evolved our standards of decency” since the 50’s, now haven’t we?
Good One!!!!
But facts don’t matter to absolute rulers.
Well, the Libtards have half of it right. America is a maturing society, in the sense of an aging population.
As for the standards of decency, there is little “decent” about the gooberment going into the business of bastard farming under the banner of the Great Society.
When bastards are subsidized, bastards are produced - in prodigeius numbers, unfortunately.
Sorry about that should have been “prodigious”.
Yes, well Stevens seems to think Miller's conviction was upheld (never mind that the bottom like on U.S. v. Miller is "REVERSED AND REMANDED".
BTW, I thought the pro-RKBA briefs talked about the Miller case. Did Stevens et al. even read them?
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