Tag: death penalty

Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to new federal death penalty procedure

Washington Post logoThe Supreme Court on Monday turned down a challenge to new federal death penalty protocols, potentially clearing the way for the government to resume executions as soon as next month for the first time since 2003.

The court, without comment, declined to take up the lawsuit filed by four death row inmates. As is customary, it gave no reason. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor indicated they would have accepted the case.

Although this removes a significant barrier to restarting federal executions, it does not mean they will automatically proceed as scheduled. The individual inmates facing execution could file additional challenges, which could affect whether and when these sentences are carried out. Continue reading.

Gorsuch just handed down the most bloodthirsty and cruel death penalty opinion of the modern era

The Supreme Court just tossed decades worth of Eighth Amendment law into the wastebasket.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bucklew v. Precythe, which it handed down Monday on a party-line vote, is at once the most significant Eighth Amendment decision of the last several decades and the cruelest in at least as much time.

Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion tosses out a basic assumption that animated the Court’s understanding of what constitutes a “cruel and unusual” punishment for more than half a century. In the process, he writes that the state of Missouri may effectively torture a man to death — so long as it does not gratuitously inflict pain for the sheer purpose of inflicting pain.

And, on top of all of that, Gorsuch would conscript death penalty defense attorneys — men and women who often gave up lucrative legal careers to protect the lives of their clients — into the ghoulish task of laying out the method that will be used to kill those clients.

View the complete April 1 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

President Trump’s claim that death sentences would stop drug trafficking

The following article by Salvador Rizzo was posted on the Washington Post website April 25, 2018:

President Trump draws a line between the death penalty and “drug problems” but his assumption is wrong. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“These people [drug dealers] kill thousands of people over the course of their lives through drugs. So we’re going to have to get much, much tougher in terms of penalty. And if you want to stop it — if you look at certain countries where they have, as an example, the death penalty, and say, ‘How’s your drug problem?’ And they will tell you, ‘We don’t have much of a drug problem.’ ”
— President Trump, during a panel discussion in Washington, March 22, 2018

Trump has a prescription for solving drug trafficking and the deadly opioid epidemic: Give the death penalty to drug dealers. Continue reading “President Trump’s claim that death sentences would stop drug trafficking”