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Living with Murderers - Supreme Court Chucks
Constitution, Follows International Opinion
The U.S.
Supreme Court threw out its own 1989 precedent and the
Constitution to decide that murderers, regardless of how
brutal or premeditated their crime, cannot be executed,
regardless of their age, as long as they commit their crime
before age 18.
The extent
of the Court's legal reasoning is contained in this
statement, "It is proper that we acknowledge the
overwhelming weight of international opinion against the
juvenile death penalty."
That's
right, the Supreme Court refused to follow their own 1989
case and based their decision solely on international
opinion.
Nobody
claimed that any juveniles were in danger of being executed.
Appeals, habeas petitions, and other legal tricks mean that
a murderer is not executed in the US until usually two
decades after his crime.
The
defendant in this case is 29 years old. When he was 17, he
burglarized a house. When he was recognized by the lady
inside he brutally beat her, hogtied her, and drove her to a
bridge where he threw her off. He bragged before and after
the crime that he would get away with it because he was a
teen.
This is
perhaps the most blatant case of judges making law based on
their own arbitrary whim since Roe v. Wade. What can we
do?
What we
should do is demand the impeachment of the five justices who
decided this case: Kennedy, Souter, Bryer, Ginsburg, and
Stevens. The act of deciding a case by ignoring the Court's
own previous Constitutional pronouncements, backed by over
200 years of legal practice, to decide solely on the basis
of international opinion is a heinous breach of the public
trust.
We want
the Court to reverse its previous decisions if they are
incorrect. And there is no problem with the Court taking
notice of international opinion. But simply to ignore the
Constitution is intolerable.
Please
call your Congressman and Senators about this at (202)
224-3121. You can read the case here.
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