The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision striking down death for those charged with raping children (in the Kennedy v. Louisiana case) is here. Corey Yung has an early post here. SCOTUS Blog has its post here.
I plan to blog more on this soon, but my preliminary thoughts are:
1. No big surprise here. Justice Kennedy believes the death penalty is constitutional, but he's not very comfortable with it. I have a suspicion that he's looking out for American's standing in world opinion - and if the U.S. started executing people for rape, a lot of Europeans would be (even more) up in arms.
2. To some degree, I think this shows that the child abduction prevention industry was successful in its claims that sexual abusers of children are essentially untreatably mentally ill. This expalins why we have to lock these folks up forever in preventive detention. But it also strips them of the necessary agency to support retributive sanctions (and of course suggests that they are undeterrable.) This makes it awfully hard to come forward now and insist that death is a legitimate punitive sanction.
More later...
I think the best punishment for a convicted rapist of a child would be to remove their penis or castrate him. If it is perfectly legal to give someone the death penalty in this country, I think is more humane to spare the life of the criminal but as a punishment, pass a law that will require a convited criminal to remove his penis and gurantee that there will not be any more victims. Other potential criminals will think more than twice before they rape a child. What do you think.
Posted by: Goose | June 25, 2008 at 12:39 PM
An eye for and eye to me is a great punishment for the a child rapist. How would they like to be sodomized and raped against their will. But who will execute the task it is the question.
Posted by: Ajlouny | May 25, 2009 at 03:03 PM