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Assessing the constitutional war over the death penalty

By Douglas A. Berman

Edward Lazarus has this new piece at FindLaw, titled "Five Decades of Fighting Over the Constitutionality of the Death Penalty: What Can We Learn from This Lengthy War?". Here is how it starts:These days, when one speaks of a "war without end," the reference is usually to Iraq.  But in the legal world, the phrase also provides an apt description of the five-decade-long fight over the constitutionality of the death penalty. Last week's decision in Baze v. Rees, in which the Court rejected a challenge to Kentucky's three-drug protocol for carrying out lethal injections, is just the latest painful yet inconclusive battle.  Like the Court's many dozens of death penalty decisions, issued over the last 45 years, the decision in Baze ensures only that the larger war will continue and that the Court's own internal culture will continue to be one of its casualties...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on April 24, 2008 (boomark / email).