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Colb on Kennedy v. Louisiana

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FindLaw.com columnist Sherry Colb writes, "Kennedy v. Louisiana and the Lessons of a Supreme Court Oral Argument."As I discussed in an earlier column, this will not be the first time that the Supreme Court has considered whether to classify the crime of rape as insufficiently serious to warrant capital punishment. In Coker v. Georgia, the Supreme Court found the death penalty to be a grossly disproportionate and therefore unconstitutional punishment for the rape of an adult woman. The Justices reasoned that even though rape is a serious offense, its victims live to see another day and therefore cannot rightly demand the ultimate retribution. There was no opinion for the Court in Coker. Justice White wrote a plurality opinion, onto which three other Justices (Blackmun, Stevens, and Stewart) signed...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 30, 2008 (boomark / email).