It's slowly creeping in! God 'elp us!(I've truncated the article...

It's slowly creeping in! God 'elp us!
(I've truncated the article a bit so it won't take too much space)


The New York Times
March 2, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS
Court Takes Another Step in Reshaping Capital Punishment
By ADAM LIPTAK

After a decade of relative quiet, the Supreme Court has in the last several years fundamentally reshaped the nation's capital justice system.

It has narrowed the class of people eligible for execution, excluding juvenile offenders yesterday as it had previously the mentally retarded. It has rebuked lower courts for sending people to their deaths without adequate safeguards. And it has paid increasing attention to the international opposition to capital punishment.

"Early in the 1990's, we reached the high point in deregulating death," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, alluding to decisions in which the court refused to hear defendants' claims of innocence because they were raised too late. "Then there was very little from the Supreme Court through the 1990's. Now, in a whole series of substantive and procedural decisions, you have a re-regulation taking place."

Opinions vary about where the process will end.

"The trend seems to be pushing toward the abolition of capital punishment," said Rory K. Little, a former Justice Department official who is now a professor at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. "But it would be a mistake to predict that these decisions are leading inexorably to abolition. It could be that they cut out all the edges and leave the core that everyone is comfortable with."

All 72 men on death row for murders they committed when they were 16 or 17 will be spared their lives under the latest decision and will instead receive the harshest punishment available, typically life without the possibility of parole.

"These people will all spend the rest of their lives in prison," said Victor L. Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University whose studies of the juvenile death penalty were cited in yesterday's decision. "Nobody's getting out."

"The next battle is the mentally ill," said Prof. Robert Blecker of the New York Law School. Given the decisions on the mentally retarded and on juveniles, Professor Blecker said, "it has a certain appeal."

Professor Blecker said he also expected opponents of the death penalty to try to move up the age separating juveniles from adults. In 1988, the Supreme Court set the line at age 16. Yesterday, it rose to 18.

"Among the issues the Supreme Court decided around the same time as the juvenile death penalty was race and the death penalty," Mr. Dieter said, alluding to a 1987 decision holding that the disparities between whites and nonwhites at the time did not offend the Constitution. "They may be ready to take another look."

Professor Zimring said he also expected more attention on procedural safeguards.

"The areas to watch for large developments in are the adequacy of representation of counsel and harmless error," he said. Opponents of the death penalty are often critical of the quality of appointed counsel for capital defendants and the willingness of courts to overlook some prosecutorial misconduct by calling it harmless.

"All over the world, we have been condemned for this," Professor Streib said. "We've now joined the rest of the world. Maybe the only country that still does this now is Iran."