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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

What if federal law allows the death penalty for raping a child and the Supreme Court analyzed "evolving standards of decency" without noticing?

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It happened!

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.
Anyone in the federal government ? or anywhere else, for that matter ? who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it....
Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals.
Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court?s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. ?We?re not talking about ancient history,? he said in an interview. ?This happened in 2006.?

What an immense shame and embarrassment for everyone involved in this case ? especially for all of the Justices of the Supreme Court!

Full post as published by Althouse on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).