From the Associated Press:
Angry politicians vowed to keep writing laws that condemn child rapists to death, despite a Supreme Court decision saying such punishment is unconstitutional.
"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this," said Alabama Attorney General Troy King, a Republican. The justices, he said, are "creating a situation where the country is a less safe place to grow up."
The court's 5-4 decision Wednesday derailed the efforts of nearly a dozen states supporting the right to kill those convicted of raping a child — and said execution was confined to attacks that take a life and to other crimes including treason and espionage.
At issue before the high court was a Louisiana case involving Patrick Kennedy, sentenced to die for raping his 8-year-old daughter in her bed, an assault so severe she required surgery.
In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote "the death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child," despite the horrendous nature of the crime.
I don't want to demonize the Supreme Court. I'd like to believe they are acting in what they perceive is the best interest of the nation, and are simply misguided. But their failure to recognize the heinousness and depravity of this crime and the callousness of their "proportional punishment" opinion borders on the psychopathic. And they have enormous power.
What judges have wrought is a coup d’état, – slow-moving and genteel, but a coup d’état nonetheless…. The nations of the West are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives, but by unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committees of lawyers applying no law other than their own will.
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