I realize there's another thread on this, but as I think this out, it may go off in another tangent. If not, I apologize in advance.
First of all, I'm a moderate, registered as an independent. I try to look at both sides as best I can, and then come to a decision. I like to read here because I get some good information.
I've been back and forth on the death penalty for some time. Part of me says that governments shouldn't kill, while part of me say that some people, as the saying goes, "just need killin'."
But if you allow capital punishment, then should you execute juveniles? That's an entirely different question.
One spring day during my sophomore year in high school, I was reading in my room when my mom came in and said she needed to talk to me.
She told me the cousin of a friend of mine had been killed. The ten year-old boy had been taken into the woods, where he was beaten, sexually molested, killed, and then sexually mutilated.
Mom then told me the name of the killer. I went to school with him. The previous semester, I had sat next to him in Driver's Ed. Hell, we had driven in the same car in Driver's Ed, and talked about stuff before and after class.
Stunned didn't even begin to describe my condition. At that point in my life, I simply didn't know what to think. It was the late 70s, and no one really knew what to make of that sort of thing. It wasn't even until many years later that I even considered what might have happened had I ever found myself alone with this predator.
But I did recall--and still recall to this day--his eyes. The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. He didn't have one. Absolutely flat. There was nothing behind those eyes. A total void. I was reminded of Robert Shaw in Jaws, describing the eyes of an attacking shark--"flat eyes, dead eyes, like a doll's eyes."
He was tried as an adult, and ended up getting life due to his age--he was only 15 or 16. Because the media had not yet developed a scent for such crimes (this was before CNN and 24/7 coverage), it wasn't a major media event.
I offer the preceding as context for the following comments on the SC decision, mainly because Christopher Simmons is clearly as emotionally dead as the killer I encountered.
- While I agree with the earlier ban on executing the mentally retarded, I don't agree that the logic excluding the retarded from execution also applies to 16 and 17 year-olds. If you're mature enough to place lives at risk behind the wheel of a car, then you're mature enough to be subject to the death penalty.
- It's best handled on a case by case basis. I can see how circumstances might be a mitigating factor in some cases (The Simmons case is NOT one of them). You want to make the standard higher to execute a minor, have at it.
- I have no problem with the concept of using, as the court put it, "evolving standards of decency" when passing sentence. A little more than 100 years ago, stealing horse or cattle was a capital offense. But the link between the standards of decency and juvenile execution are tenuous at best, and it sets a dangerous precedent, IMNSHO, that future cases might be judged on public opinion as opposed to the law (Justice O'Connor makes a similar point in her dissent).
- Justice O'Connor's dissent is well reasoned, and pretty much matches my personal opinion.
- Justice Scalia needs a sedative. Or perhaps an anti-psychotic. At times his dissent reads like he's a speechwriter for Zell Miller. God help us all if he gets to be Chief Justice.