I don’t like how they got to the decision, but I like the outcome:
In a ruling that marked a change in “national standards,” a divided Supreme Court Tuesday ruled that the execution of juvenile killers is unconstitutional.
The 5-4 decision tosses out the death sentence of a Missouri man who was 17-years-old when he murdered a St. Louis area woman in 1993…
In a sharp dissent delivered from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed that argument as “no way to run a legal system.”
“We must disregard the new reality that — to the extent our Eighth Amendment decisions constitute something more than a show of hands on the current Justices’ personal views (on the death penalty) — they purport to be nothing more than a snapshot of American public opinion at a particular point in time,” he wrote.
“Allowing lower courts to reinterpret the Eighth Amendment whenever they decide enough time has passed for a new snapshot leaves this court’s decisions without any force,” Justice Scalia writes.
He also criticized the majority opinion for including references to international opposition to the juvenile death penalty.
“Only seven countries other than the United States have executed juvenile offenders since 1990,” Kennedy writes. “Since then each of these countries has either abolished capital punishment for juveniles or made public disavowal of the practice.”
Anticipating criticism, Kennedy adds, “The opinion of the world community, while not controlling our outcome, does provide respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions.”
Scalia was undeterred in his dissent. “To invoke alien law when it agrees with one’s own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry,” he says.
Scalia, as usual is right- but I like the outcome of this decision despite the flawed and exceptionally dangerous reasoning that brought us to it. Via How Appealing, more content on why the decision making in this case was particularly troubling.
The decision can be found here.