The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 2 of 20)

br> -- Mike Dooley /p>

William Tucker missed the point in the SCOTUS ruling to over-turn the Louisiana death penalty law for rape. This was another example of judicial moralizing at the expense of the states rights. I do agree in the abstract that the death penalty may be counterproductive when applied to rape; however, the legislators of Louisiana were compelled by the heinousness of the crime. Raping a child is as bad as murder in their eyes and should be punished as such. Whether the death penalty works in deterring crime is a matter for state attorneys and lawmakers and not the Federal Judiciary. Five members of the courts believed otherwise. Writing for the Majority, Justice Kennedy wrote that the punishment was disproportionate to the crime. That is, the majority didn't find a legal problem with the law from a technical point of view, but they did agree that raping a child isn't as heinous as say murdering an innocent bystander during a robbery. The courts in short rendered a moral opinion, which they substituted for the Louisiana Law. Practical moral philosophy is accomplished in the legislators of our state houses and Congress and not in the courts. The death penalty as practiced by most states (Letha Injection) is quite "humane," which renders the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment non-applicable.

p>Personally, I'm against the death penalty. Yet, it is not up to me or the courts to decide whether the death penalty is immoral in the State of Louisiana. In recent years our courts have acted more like Plato's Philosopher Kings than Learned Hand. Justice Scalia was right when he referred to the courts as our "Master in black robes". br> -- JP br> Indiana /p> p> William Tucker writes a nice argument for debate in the Louisiana state government although I am not convinced that child rapists are affected much by rational thought. It is amazing that he didn't write this article when the debate was actually going on. I can certainly live with life sentences with no chance of parole for this crime but I am worried that a very liberal Supreme Court can and will find this unconstitutional as well. The idea of letting nine oligarchs decide this is the problem with the Supreme Court's ruling. I am sure that one could find all kinds of stupidity in state laws but the corrective is not using the Supreme Court to eliminate bad laws based on goofy constitutional reasoning. This creates a problem when five out of nine do something stupid (and they are very capable), there is no easy corrective. When we accept that the fact that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of all aspects of our government (federal, state and local) we are no longer living in a representative republic but in an elitist oligarchy. No thanks! br> -- Clifton Briner /p>

Although I am not sure I agree with it, there is some merit to William Tucker's argument that the penalty for child rape should be kept lower than the penalty for murder. This is something that should be hashed out in our legislatures, not in our courts.

p>I would ask Tucker if he believes that, in those states that have eliminated the death penalty, the maximum penalty for child rape should be something less than life without possibility of parole, for the same reasons he gives in the fourth paragraph of his article.

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