The Supreme Court is "fine-tuning" the death penalty again:
The Supreme Court rules that death-row inmates may challenge lethal injection as an unnecessarily cruel -- and thus unconstitutional -- punishment. The unanimous decision came on the same day the court expanded inmates' ability to challenge their convictions in federal court based on new DNA evidence.
The lethal-injection ruling makes no sense to me. We're dispatching someone to eternity, and we're fussy about pain that might be felt in the last few seconds of life? That stretches "cruel and unusual" to an absurd point. It's the "Did we shoot or beat up Zarqawi after we dropped two 500-pound bombs on him?" school of sensitivity.
The ruling on DNA evidence -- that's the one that was NOT unanimous -- seems right, though. People sentenced to death deserve every chance, no matter how late in the case, to use whatever new evidence is available to prove their innocence. Forbidding such appeals on techinal issues really is cruel and unusual.
The Indiana reaction is heavy on the euphoria felt by death-penalty opponents, who say, correctly, that this will delay executions. The court did not go so far as to say lethal injections were cruel and unusual. States, naturally, will feel free to change the cocktail mix used to dispatch miscreants, and, of course, that mix will also be challengeable. "Sentenced to death" is coming closer to meaning "dying of old age in prison," which is the ultimate goal of capital punishment opponents.
