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| Sniper Murderer won't face death penalty |
| 2005-03-02 |
| From the Washington Examiner By a slim majority, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday barred the execution of persons convicted of committing crimes before turning 18... Perhaps the highest-profile case the ruling affects is that of convicted sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, who before Monday, faced at least one more capital murder trial in Virginia for his role in the October 2002 sniper shootings Personally I'm not a big supporter of the death penalty for minors but in this case the majority of the SCOTUS has written a decision which isn't as good as a typical freshman college thesis. |
| Posted by:mhw |
| #7 the liberal 5 on the SCOTUS have turned to Int'l law and ICC rulings rather than American laws and State laws. What todo? Stand for Bush's judges and eventually this gaggle of euro-whores will die/be replaced. Don't let the Chuck Schumers of the Senate have their way and remember this ruling every time you hear a Donk call Bush's picks: extremist |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-03-02 7:56:00 PM |
| #6 "...To support its opinion that States should be prohibited from imposing the death penalty on anyone who committed murder before age 18, the Court looks to scientific and sociological studies, picking and choosing those that support its position." Making the focus the age rather than premeditation and gravity of the crime. So what would happen to 17 year old sadistic murderers modeled after BTK-life in prison for repeated torture and murder? Does the sentence fit the crime? What has happened to our discernment and judgment? |
| Posted by: jules 2 2005-03-02 7:48:20 PM |
| #5 ..Re:Malvo, as staisfying as it would be to personally stick the needle in his arm myself, I'm old enough to know that somewhere in the back of his twisted little mind, he may have welcomed death, knowing he wouldn't spend the rest of his life in a cell. Now...well, let's just say I think he might take care of things for us. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2005-03-02 7:17:38 PM |
| #4 As a general rule, I'm not in favor of executing juvies, but when the merits of the case warrant, that leeway should be the call of the States and their legislature, not some foreign court precedent. This is bad news. I applaud Scalia. |
| Posted by: H8_UBL 2005-03-02 5:10:06 PM |
| #3 Malvo gets to spend his twenties in ADX Florence instead of getting a nice, clean needle? Suits me just fine. I just don't like the co$t to keep him in prison. We will be paying a million dollars in the years that he sits in prison. Probably another million "rehabilitating" him. |
| Posted by: daj 2005-03-02 2:19:28 PM |
| #2 WAS TRYING TO POST THIS AS AN OPINION. OPINION DOES NOT SEEM TO BE WORKING. SEEMS RELAVANT HERE. EXCUSE THE LENGTH It is amazing to me that the greatest president of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan appointed a smarmy Eurocentric sycophant such as Anthony Kennedy to the supreme court. Whether on not one agrees that persons under 18 should be subject to the death penalty, the logic behind the decision which included references that are extra-constitutional bodes ill for our national sovereignty. Our determination that the death penalty is disproportionate punishment for offenders under 18 finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty. Just because we are the only democratic country that allows it does not mean that we are wrong. You yourself Justice Kennedy stated what this âjuvenile offenderâ did: Before its commission Simmons said he wanted to murder someone. In chilling, callous terms he talked about his plan, discussing it for the most part with two friends, Charles Benjamin and John Tessmer, then aged 15 and 16 respectively. Simmons proposed to commit burglary and murder by breaking and entering, tying up a victim, and throwing the victim off a bridge. Simmons assured his friends they could âget away with itâ because they were minors. The three met at about 2 a.m. on the night of the murder, but Tessmer left before the other two set out. (The State later charged Tessmer with conspiracy, but dropped the charge in exchange for his testimony against Simmons.) Simmons and Benjamin entered the home of the victim, Shirley Crook, after reaching through an open window and unlocking the back door. Simmons turned on a hallway light. Awakened, Mrs. Crook called out, âWhoâs there?â In response Simmons entered Mrs. Crookâs bedroom, where he recognized her from a previous car accident involving them both. Simmons later admitted this confirmed his resolve to murder her. Using duct tape to cover her eyes and mouth and bind her hands, the two perpetrators put Mrs. Crook in her minivan and drove to a state park. They reinforced the bindings, covered her head with a towel, and walked her to a railroad trestle spanning the Meramec River. There they tied her hands and feet together with electrical wire, wrapped her whole face in duct tape and threw her from the bridge, drowning her in the waters below. But then you excuse it, âOprah Winfreyâ style... Three general differences between juveniles under 18 and adults demonstrate that juvenile offenders cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders. First, as any parent knows and as the scientific and sociological studies respondent and his amici cite tend to confirm, â[a] lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility are found in youth more often than in adults and are more understandable among the young. These qualities often result in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.â Impetuous, you say, Justice Kennedy? So when someone hits the 18th birthday he is magically more culpable than he was the day before? Just as the politically correct say that only whites can be racist, you say that 17 years and 364 days old canât be gruesome in the commission of a murder and we have to understand his acts as âIll considered actionsâ of youth? Ronald Reagan also appointed someone else, someone who has a much clearer American mind who seems a little ticked at his colleagues: Justice Antonin Scalia gave us all pause for thought. He is giving voice to the growing concern of us regular American citizens, not some Euro-trash elites, that we are losing our national sovereignty by the inclusion of references to European law in decisions, and that the Supreme Court is setting itself up as an extra-legislative body. The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nationâs moral standardsâand in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent. Heh heh heh... Does the wourd âouchâ belong here? I think so! Also, unlike the conciliatory âI respectfully dissentâ closure by Justice OâConnor, it was simply âI dissentâ Now the liberals went into ecstasy when Justice Ginzburg concluded her opinion in Bush v. Gore, but no one seems to notice this. This is the way a member of the court says to the majority, âYou are nuts.â Very instructive. As was this remark: Todayâs opinion provides a perfect example of why judges are ill equipped to make the type of legislative judgments the Court insists on making here. To support its opinion that States should be prohibited from imposing the death penalty on anyone who committed murder before age 18, the Court looks to scientific and sociological studies, picking and choosing those that support its position. It never explains why those particular studies are methodologically sound; none was ever entered into evidence or tested in an adversarial proceeding. Justice OâConnor, even though not able to sign on to Justice Scaliaâs smackdown of his colleagues, does understand a very cogent point. It helps that she was once an Arizona State Senator... Although it is probable that but for a few technicalities she might have signed up with the majority... Without a clearer showing that a genuine national consensus forbids the execution of such offenders, this Court should not substitute its own âinevitably subjective judgmentâ on how best to resolve this difficult moral question for the judgments of the Nationâs democratically elected legislatures. Justice Scalia concludes : To allow lower courts to behave as we do, âupdatingâ the Eighth Amendment as needed, destroys stability and makes our case law an unreliable basis for the designing of laws by citizens and their representatives, and for action by public officials. The result will be to crown arbitrariness with chaos. In a comment yesterday, related to the ordered release of âDirty Bombâ Padilla by a Federal Judge in South Carolina, I remarked that if the judiciary continues to make unsound decisions that are out of touch with either the realities of a current situation, or are so alien to the society at large, they could begin to be ignored, and anarchy might ensue. Justice Scalia said it so much better and succinctly than I ever could. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-03-02 12:27:14 PM |
| #1 And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole No one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried Mama tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied That leaves only me to blame cause mama tried. --Merle Haggard Malvo gets to spend his twenties in ADX Florence instead of getting a nice, clean needle? Suits me just fine. |
| Posted by: gromky 2005-03-02 11:11:29 AM |