Justice Kennedy is at it again. Writing for a 5-4 majority Kennedy today announced that the death penalty may not be imposed upon those who rape children. The natural repugnance decent people feel for child rapists is borne not out of any defect of reason but rather out of an intuitive understanding that child rape is a horrible, awful, indefensible, inexplicably depraved act. Justice Kennedy regards that intuition with contempt.
Kennedy is equally contemptuous of the rule of law and the meaning of words. According to the AP report (I have not yet read the decision), Kennedy reasoned, "The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child." However, the U.S. Constitution contains no requirement that punishment be proportional. Instead, it prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. If execution is not cruel and unusual for a murderer, nothing in logic suggests that it would be cruel or unusual for a child rapist. But in Justice Kennedy's world, in which we are all voiceless subjects, words have no meaning.
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3 comments:
Lawmakers are assuming criminals are legal scholars. They are assuming when a horny bastard picks up a child to rape, he knows he may be subject to death penalty. They think it's more heinous when a horny bastard sticks his prick into a child's sexual organ than if he stuck a 10 inch knife into the child's abdomen. How they figured that out is beyond me.
What the heck?
The whole problem with executing child rapists is that we head down a slippery slope. Why not then execute carjackers? Robbers? Burglars? The world would be a lot nicer without them. Where do you stop? If someone doesn't draw a line in the sand, you end up cutting off arms for shoplifting.
You have to weigh the punishment against the crime carefully, and do so without emotional involvement. Rape does not equal death, no matter how you spin it.
And you know what? If you are a burglar, robber, or rapist, and the victim shoots you, you deserve to rott in hell. That is self defense, since you are a clear and present danger. Executing someone after a trial is just mob revenge.
Thanks, both, for your comments. injvstice, I recommend that you do a little reading on retributive justice theory. That would clear up quite a bit of your confusion.
In any event, I am not arguing that punishment should not be proportional to the crime. I am simply observing that (1) the constitution does not require that punishment be proportional and (2) the vast majority of people believe (rightly in my view) that execution is proportional to child rape.
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