About one thing Aharon Barak, former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, is right: constitutionalism—the imposition by judges of their moral intuitions on an unsuspecting public—is on the rise everywhere. The opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana could have been written by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, so lacking was it in anything bordering on coherent analysis.
A five-to-four majority of the court ruled that imposition by Louisiana of the death penalty on Patrick Kennedy for brutally raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter and inflicting internal injuries far too gruesome to describe would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. According to Justice Kennedy, the Constitution contemplates that in the end “our [i.e., the justices] own judgment” will be determinative. Yet the only argument he offered for why murder, alone of crimes against individuals, may be punished by death is that murder victims are dead. Such profundity is Kennedy’s trademark.
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On June 17, 2006, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts granted the request of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services to cut off the respirator from Haleigh Poutre, an 11-year-old girl who had been savagely beaten by her aunt and stepfather. The court was informed that Haleigh was “in an irreversible and permanent coma, with the least amount of brain function that a person can still have and be considered alive.”..........
Supreme Arrogance The Devolving Value Of Life
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