The other aspect of this, the courts... No sardonic tone is intended here, but bave the courts ever done anything to shake our confidence in their adherence to the Constitution? Have their collective actions over the last few decades aroused any suspicions about an underlying agenda? To be blunt, have the American courts, taken as an aggregate, shown themselves trustworthy as weighed on the Constitutional scale?
These questions provide a substrate for much of the second-guessing of the court decisions in this particular case.
Oh, yes, they definitely have disrepute to our system of law. But, as Justice Scalia pointed out the other day, they have departed the path when they substitute their policy judgments for the application of the law. BUT, here they are doing exacting what our courts are quite good at -- applying a well-established rule of law to the facts at hand and weighing conflicting claims of fact in deciding on the facts. This is not some 'make-it-up-as-you-go-along' constitutional law case; this is what thousands and thousands of courts do everyday in this land: weigh conflicting claims of credibility, decide the existence of facts and apply well-established rules of law to those facts. While the result here affects someone's physical life, the process used to get there is quite common and quite reliable.
For the same reason that I (as a former prosecutor) would gladly pull the switch on the poison pill machine for all those on death row, I have confidence in this decision as well. This is the kind of decision-making in which our system works quite well.