3 Justices Urge Broader Death Penalty Ban: Three Supreme Court justices said yesterday the court should consider abolishing the death penalty for killers who committed their crimes as minors. Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer were outvoted in the case of a Texas inmate who was scheduled to die yesterday for a killing committed when he was 17. Toronto Patterson had asked the high court to delay his execution and consider whether such executions are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. He was executed late yesterday. The three justices, part of the court's liberal wing, said Patterson's execution should be put off at least until the Supreme Court convenes next month to consider cases for the coming term.

There may or may not be a consensus forming in the country about the execution of juveniles -- I'm not sure what that would be based on, since the bare majority of the 40 states with some form of execution allow execution for crimes committed under the age of 18. (21 of 40, according to Capital Punishment 2000, issued December 2001 by the US Department of Justice.) It's not that I don't think that barring the execution of people for crimes committed while they were juveniles wouldn't be a good thing to do; it's just that there's no domestic consensus whatsoever that it's something we should stop doing, as opposed to the execution of the mentally retarded. (Of course, if you add in the states which don't allow execution at all, then you wind up with 29 of 50 saying that execution for crimes committed by juveniles is wrong. Which may or may not be how the liberal wing would prefer to present it.)

In any event, if the Court itself can't determine to halt an execution so that the case can be heard, how can they expect to come to consensus themselves? Granted that this is unusually public pressure from the Court itself -- and has anyone noticed that these little off-term statements by Court members are becoming more frequent? -- but it's highly unlikely at this stage that the liberal wing of the court is going to get enough people to even agree to hear such a case in the near future. After all, if these three were voting to hear the case, all they needed was just one of the moderates or conservatives to agree that the case should be heard, and they couldn't get that vote.

Side note: given the number of people on death row in various states, it looks like California and Texas will be getting those chairs and syringes a workout pretty soon. After all, with that number of people awaiting execution, surely the states will begin running into large numbers of them who have finally exhausted their appeals. It will certainly be an odd sight to watch crunchy-granola-liberal California vying with Texas and maybe Florida for the title of Execution Capital of the World.

Side Note 2: Interesting little nugget hidden away in the report.

Persons under sentence of death

                    1990      2000

White              1,379     1,990

Black                947     1,535

American Indian       25        29

Asian                 15        27

Unknown race           1        12

On the one hand, the number of blacks and whites under sentence of death increased by roughly the same number. On the other hand, the proportion of blacks compared to whites has spiked dramatically; it's very close to actual parity. Considering as we're only 20% of the country's population, surely that indicates that something terribly odd is happening out there. What it is, I'm sure I don't know.