, something frowned on by death-penalty abolitionists. According to the lightweight Justice Breyer, it “is a relic of the past and inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society,” dontcha know. Leaving aside the perennial question of how unelected lawyers with unlimited terms of office have the capacity to judge shifts in pubic opinion, I don’t know how death-penalty abolitionists can make this case with any moral consistency. If the death penalty is wrong, it’s wrong — on anybody. Are they saying that it’s particularly heinous to execute a 17-year-old minor for a brutal murder, but not quite as bad to execute an 18-year-old for that crime?
Yes, that’s exactly what they’re saying. Here’s an excerpt from the UPI story about the four justices who dissented from the refusal to consider this particular case:
Monday’s dissent came in the case of Kevin Nigel Stanford, who was convicted in 1981 of a murder committed in Kentucky when he was 17 years and 4 months old.
Stanford and an accomplice repeatedly raped and sodomized a 20-year-old woman during the robbery of a gas station where she worked. The men took her to a wooded area, and Stanford shot her point blank in the face, then in the back of the head, to prevent her from testifying against him.
So if Mr. Stanford had been eight months older, then it wouldn’t have been as bad to execute him. Isn’t that what they’re saying? Can somebody explain that reasoning? Anyone?
If you ask the American public if they think the death penalty is appropriate for minors, you’d likely get a far different result than if you asked them about the case of Kevin Nigel Stanford. I bet there are many people who say they’re against a juvenile death penalty in general who would be willing to throw the switch for that particular “boy.”
The argument is particularly specious because we’re not talking about the violation of some arcane tax law, but about hurting and killing innocent people. Toddlers know it’s bad to hurt people. Little kids know it’s wrong to kill the innocent. A 17-year-old does too.
The court also refused to consider the case of sad, suffering Charles Kenneth Foster, who has been on Florida’s death row since the Ford administration. Justice Breyer, “If executed, Foster, now 55, will have been punished both by death and also by more than a generation spent in death row’s twilight…It is fairly asked whether such punishment is both unusual and cruel.” Justice Thomas would have none of that dreck:
Long delays are simply part of the death penalty jurisprudence imposed by the courts, Thomas said….Foster “could long ago have ended his ‘anxieties and uncertainties’ … by submitting to what the people of Florida have deemed him to deserve: execution,” Thomas said. “Moreover, this judgment would not have been made had (Foster) not slit Julian Lanier’s throat, dragged him into the bushes, and then, when (Foster) realized that he could hear Lanier breathing, cut his spine.”
Darn right! I love that man, a love dwarfed only by my affection for Justice Scalia.