WE Blog

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate took a look at Kansas’ death penalty law and whether putting someone to death can be reduced to a sort of algebra problem:
“It’s awfully rare to hear a Supreme Court argument in which the word ‘moral’ comes up as often as it does today. And in the end, this decision will turn on what ‘moral’ really means to each justice. Scalia thinks it’s moral for the people of Kansas to decide that equipoise equals death. Souter says that a moral judgment that leads to the death penalty should have the clarity of an either/or decision, not a tie. Breyer, Breyer-like, suggests that you can either see it one way, or the other. But Roberts is right, I think, when he says that all this painstaking counting and measuring of aggravating and mitigating beans simply complicates the hard, messy work of putting someone to death.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley