Supreme Court Wants Kinder, Gentler Executions

The seers on the Supreme Court have found yet another right in the Constitution that nobody in 217 years has been able to spot. The court ruled today that it is unconstitutional to execute murderers who committed their crimes as minors. The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes. The executions, the court said, were unconstitutionally cruel. So, the High Court has found a right to life for minors who kill. Drive-by shooters no longer need fear the death penalty. Home invaders no longer need fear dying at the hands of the state. The perpetrators of school massacres can look forward to a full life. So, no matter how cruel and unusual the crime, execution for the crime is now cruel and unusual if the monster who commits it is under the age of 18. Try as they might, (and the don't even try) the very same court can't find anything cruel and unusual about executing unborn babies. Ripping them limb from limb while they are still in the womb is not cruel and unusual. Charring them to death with a saline solution injection is not cruel and unusual. Driving a scissors into the back of their head and sucking out their brain while their body is fully outside the womb is not cruel and unusual. The only thing cruel and unusual here is how a bunch of black-robed, unelected, unaccountable judges have the power to rip away the will of the people as casually as any third-world dictator could. Liberals must be joyously celebrating today. Once again, they have used the courts to subjugate the freedoms of the states. In a dissent, Scalia decried the decision, arguing that there has been no clear trend of declining juvenile executions to justify a growing consensus against the practice. "The court says in so many words that what our people's laws say about the issue does not, in the last analysis, matter: 'In the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty,' he wrote in a 24-page dissent. "The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards," Scalia wrote.