j u s t c r i m

A justice’s blind eye to the truth - The Boston Globe

I’M NOT a regular reader of The New York Review of Books, but I wasn’t going to miss newly-retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s essay on capital punishment in the latest issue. Last Sunday, The New York Times spotlighted the Stevens article as a “remarkable’’ piece of writing that finally settled a “legal mystery’’ — namely, why Stevens had changed his original view on the death penalty, and announced in 2008 that he now considered it to be unconstitutional.

via www.boston.com

[thru Sentencing Law  & Policy and How Appealing]

There Are No Liberals on the Roberts Court - Garrett Epps - The Atlantic

An exchange in yesterday's oral argument illustrates the subtle ideological imbalance of the Roberts Court. The case was Schwarzenegger v. Plata. Plata concerns a federal-court order that California reduce the number of inmates in its prisons. The prison system's overcrowded state had caused medical and mental-health care to degenerate so sharply that the state was violating the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." A federal statute authorizes a special court, as a last resort, to order states to reduce their prison populations. One of the two cases in Plata had been pending for 20 years, through scores of delays and missed deadlines by the state; a court finally made the order, and California was appealing.

via www.theatlantic.com

Stevens' Death Penalty Case Lets Himself Off Too Easily - TIME

Suppose that you hired a highly regarded architect to design a fancy house. He comes up with the most impressive and elaborate plans, but all the basic calculations about stresses and loads are completely wrong, and from the moment you first open the front door, the place starts falling apart.

Still, you have a lot invested in the house, and you don't want to tear it down, so you bring in an engineer who proposes that you jack up the north wing, and when that doesn't work you hire a contractor who advises you to instead lower the south wing. One expert suggests reinforcing the foundation. Another expert tells you to redesign the roof.

You try them all, and more. And this goes on for years, plunging you into debt, baffling your neighbors, and never coming close to fixing your house, which looks more and more hopeless with each new "repair." Then one day, the original architect comes by, sees the ruin, shakes his head sadly and asks why, oh why, did you let all those butchers tinker with his beautiful design.

via www.time.com

On the Death Sentence by John Paul Stevens | The New York Review of Books

David Garland is a well-respected sociologist and legal scholar who taught courses on crime and punishment at the University of Edinburgh before relocating to the United States over a decade ago. His recent Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition is the product of his attempt to learn “why the United States is such an outlier in the severity of its criminal sentencing.” Thus, while the book primarily concerns the death penalty, it also illuminates the broader, dramatic differences between American and Western European prison sentences.

Describing his study, Garland explains:

In fact, despite its ostensible amorality, his work makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

via www.nybooks.com

J. Stevens on Capital Punishment - New York Times

Supreme Court Memo

Ex-Justice Criticizes Death Penalty

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: November 27, 2010

" ... In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, [Stevens] wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria...."

j. steven's evolution

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]

u.s. catholic on stevens' retirement and capital punishment jurisprudence

U.S. Catholic - In conversation with American Catholics - "Stevens' retirement leaves court without strongest death penalty critic" (Patricia Zapor, Catholic News Service. Tuesday, April 13, 2010).

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- "The retirement this spring of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens leaves the court without its strongest critic of the death penalty...

Stevens' career on the court has included more than 3,500 opinions, including some on which his views have shifted during his 35-year career, notably on capital punishment.

On the death penalty, in 1976, months after he joined the court, Stevens co-wrote the main opinion that allowed the reinstatement of capital punishment. But in 2008 in an opinion that ultimately upheld Kentucky's method of lethal injection, Baze v. Rees, Stevens asked whether the time has come to reconsider "the justification for the death penalty itself."

He also wrote rulings or concurring opinions in cases that found the death penalty unconstitutional for juveniles and for people who are mentally retarded..."