Ex-Justice Stevens Explains Reversal of Death Penalty Stance.

[elleng]

In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28memo.html?_r=1&hp

[Xipe Totec]

1. Hysteria is always written by the victors nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. It's so good to see he took the time to do this. Thank you, elleng. K & R.

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[elleng]

3. Thanks, Judi. He's truly one of the good guys,

and many have known this for a long time.

[Overseas]

4. K&R ! //nt

[Uncle Joe]

5. I commend Justice Stevens on his come around and I look forward to this 60 Minutes episode, but

I disagree with Stevens in regards to the potential to perfect the Capital Punishment system.

In discussing the book, Justice Stevens defended the promise of the Supreme Court’s 1976 decisions reinstating the death penalty even as he detailed the ways in which he said that promise had been betrayed.

With the right procedural safeguards, Justice Stevens wrote, it would be possible to isolate the extremely serious crimes for which death is warranted. But he said the Supreme Court had instead systematically dismantled those safeguards.

Human frailties are too absolute, so even if you created a perfect system; at some point it would succumb.

Thanks for the thread, elleng.