capital punishment

The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that will determine whether child rapists are eligible for the death penalty. No one has been executed in the US, except for the crime of murder, since 1964.

Before this morning's arguments on whether Louisiana can execute Patrick Kennedy' the Chief Justice read an opinion that must have made the condemned man's lawyers' hearts sink. In what might give a signal, however faint, of the Court's disposition toward capital punishment, John Roberts delivered a judgment that roundly rejected the claim by two Kentucky death-row inmates that lethal injection would be a cruel way to kill them, and therefore prohibited under the Eighth amendment to the Constitution. A healthy majority of 7-2 sided against the inmates. And on a Court that thinks pumping a man full of toxic chemicals is not likely to cause a "'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm," Kennedy could not expect a great deal of compassion.

An Afghan court sentenced journalism student Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for downloading and distributing an article calling Muhammad a "killer and adulterer."

And US college students think they have it rough when caught downloading illegally.   By now, what rankles most about these calls for death sentences -- for naughty novels, misnamed teddy-bears, scandalous downloads -- is not just that they happen, but that the weird-beards of radical Islam have made them seem routine.  Is every act of violence and religious perversity capable of seeming normal through repetition?  How frightening to think that we might be subject to this inuring effect, if the same courts decided to enforce, say, the rules concerning slavery in the Koran.  To compensate for this creeping change in the terms of the argument, we defenders of heresy need to escalate our denunciations each time an atrocity like this is likely to happen.  Regrettably, the denunciations have instead become quieter and less impassioned instead.