From SCOTUSBlog:
In a widely splintered decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for death-row executions to resume across the country, concluding that the most common method of lethal injection does not violate the Constitution. The final vote was 7-2 in Baze v. Rees (07-5439), although there was no opinion that spoke for five or more Justices...The full .pdf of the opinion (97 pages) can be found here.
If defense lawyers do now mount new challenges, they will have to seek new court orders delaying specific executions, because the Supreme Court had not issued a formal moratorium on executions, even though — as a practical reality — it had not allowed any scheduled execution to occur while it was considering the Baze case. Thus, states would be free to schedule new execution dates.
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Has anyone read Farhad Manjoo's new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society"? NYTIMES editorialist Nicholas D. Kristof mentions this book in our local op-ed page, where Manjoo cites a Stanford University study re: capital punishment. Kristof says, "The students were shown the same two studies: One suggested that exectuions have a deterrent effect that reduces subsequent murders, and the other doubted that. Whatever their stance, the students found the study that supported their position to be well conducted and persuasive and the other one to be profoundly flawed. 'That led to a funny result. People in the study became polarized', Manjoo writes."
Kristof calls this the best political book so far this year - its theme being our personal biases in the way we absorb information. Perhaps his book offers interesting support for the wisdom of InCase's goal for a moratorium on the death penalty.
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