The Rehnquist Death Court At Work

Here we are, nearly a decade after William Rehnquist, 16th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, died, yet some of his most morally offensive, full-blown batsh!t crazy decisions continue to affect... for the worse... the world we live in. An example struck me recently (no, I was not injured) in Kos writer Shaun King's article Did you know the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that it's legal to execute an innocent person?.

If you read that post, please also skim a few of the comments (not all 200 or so; that would be injurious to your mental health): you'll find basically two kinds of comments... those by opponents of the death penalty, and those by lawyers. The latter seem to feel certain they can convince the former of the error of their ways if only they are allowed to browbeat them sufficiently on the legal issues surrounding capital punishment, not realizing that for some of us it isn't a matter of whether the state can legally execute someone, but whether they ever should, not a matter of whether it can be done constitutionally, but whether it can be accomplished humanely...

Chain of being [i.e., being whacked]

Oh, that, and the little matter of how much taxpayers' money could be saved by simply eliminating the death penalty and all the lawyers dancing on heads of pins that inevitably surround every single case in which it is sought. The cost of the trial and subsequent imprisonment for "life-without-parole" doesn't even begin to compare with the cost of the dancing... and if, in the end, the guilty verdict turns out to be factually unsupported, the punishment is a whole lot easier to reverse.