SCOTUS BLOG - Doubts About Death - The evolution of Justice Stevens’s capital punishment jurisprudence - "The following essay for our series on John Paul Stevens is by Lauren Sudeall Lucas (scroll down on this page to see her bio). Lucas clerked for Justice Stevens during the 2006 Term, and is now a Staff Attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia."
"The 2006 Term, during which I served as a law clerk to Justice Stevens, has been characterized by many as the year in which the Court made clear that it had become a strikingly more conservative institution...
For one group, however, there was perhaps one bright spot: the group was capital defendants and the bright spot was Justice Stevens. The death penalty cases from the 2006 Term demonstrated a continuing evolution in Justice Stevens’ jurisprudence regarding the legal process by which we put capital defendants to death and the Justice’s willingness to recognize the flaws in a system that has long been broken..." [SCOTUSBLOG]
