How Republican Justices Evolve Leftward – The Ninth Justice

National Journal

Justice John Paul Stevens, who in most portrayals has migrated from the center of the court when appointed by President Ford in 1975 to its left flank, has told several reporters that his ideology has not really changed much.

Rather, according to Stevens, he has remained about where he always was while newer and younger appointees have pushed the court to the right.

The record suggests otherwise. Like many of us, this extraordinarily intelligent, self-effacing gentleman, who will turn 90 on April 20, may be kidding himself a bit about his own consistency.

Like some other Republican-appointed justices in recent decades — Harry Blackmun and Sandra Day O’Connor and, to a lesser extent, David Souter, Warren Burger and Lewis Powell — Stevens has become markedly more liberal during his years on the court.

Meanwhile, no Democratic-appointed justice has become substantially more conservative over time. This helps explain why, despite the fact that Republican presidents have appointed 12 of the last 15 justices, the court itself has never — or, at least not yet — made the dramatic right turn that many reporters and commentators have repeatedly proclaimed. Indeed, the court’s rulings have remained left of the center of general public opinion on most (though not all) of the biggest issues.

What explains the asymmetry in justices’ evolution? More on that below. First, some facts about Stevens and other leftward-moving justices.

America’s Prison Spree Has Brutal Impact

National Journal

The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.

But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it’s a running sore that rarely generates dramatic "news." That is our criminal-justice system’s incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.

Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men — many of them fathers — to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.)

America imprisons seven times as many people as it did in 1972, several times as many per capita as other Western nations, and many more than any other nation in the world.

Yes, violent criminals should be locked up for long enough to protect the rest of us. But the mass, long-term imprisonment of nonviolent, nondangerous offenders in recent decades and excessive terms for others has made us no safer while ruining countless lives and converting potentially productive citizens into career criminals.

Opening Argument – The Death Penalty: Slowly Fading?

National Journal

When the Supreme Court voided all federal death-penalty laws in June 1972 — despite the Constitution’s clear intent to allow capital punishment — three justices explained that these laws had become "cruel and unusual punishment" because they violated "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

But then, public opinion moved sharply in an unexpected direction. Support for the death penalty soared in the months after the 5-4 decision in Furman v. Georgia. It was 50 percent to 42 percent (an 8-point spread) in March 1972 and 57 percent to 32 percent (a 25-point spread) that November. It kept soaring for two decades, in close sync with crime rates, to a high of 78 percent to 17 percent in the early 1990s. (All numbers are from Gallup polls.)

"Furman, like other landmark cases, had the effect of calling its opponents to action," Stuart Banner wrote in 2002 in The Death Penalty: An American History. One result was the passage of new state death-penalty laws. The justices upheld some of them in 1976 and thereafter because they provided for special hearings to weigh mitigating against aggravating evidence and thus made the process of deciding who dies less capricious (at least in theory). And the number of death sentences pronounced each year by juries rose steadily, to a post-Furman high of 317 in 1996.

But although polls show that about 65 percent of the public still supports capital punishment in the abstract, the number of juries opting for death has plunged, from 317 in 1996 to 128 in 2005, the latest year for which complete data are available. Similarly, the number of executions has dropped from a modern high of 98 in 1999 to 53 in 2006.

At the same time, experts agree, many prosecutors have become more reluctant to seek the death sentence.

Opening Argument – Innocents in Prison

National Journal

As recently as 20 years ago, it was extraordinarily rare for a convicted prisoner to establish his or her innocence conclusively enough to get public attention. That changed with breakthroughs in DNA science.

The 205th DNA exoneration since 1989 was recorded earlier this month by the Innocence Project, a group of crack defense lawyers who have made such cases their mission. The exonerated prisoners — including 15 who had been sentenced to death — have been found innocent by courts, prosecutors, or governors based on post-conviction DNA testing.

But America has been too slow to appreciate that the DNA exonerations, and other evidence, suggest that many thousands of other wrongly convicted people are rotting in prisons and jails around the country. And our federal, state, and local governments and courts have done far too little to adopt proposed criminal justice reforms that could reduce the number of innocent people convicted while nailing more of the real criminals.

The case of the most recent DNA exonoree, Byron Halsey, was typical: Based on a confession full of obviously false details, extracted by high-pressure interrogation, he spent 19 years in prison in New Jersey for two heinous child murders committed by another man in 1985. Halsey was able to prove his innocence only after a 2002 New Jersey law forced reluctant prosecutors to give his counsel access to DNA evidence. In Halsey’s and some 70 other DNA-exoneration cases, DNA also helped to establish the guilt of the real perpetrators. All or almost all had committed other violent crimes before being caught.

Opening Argument – The Court, And Foreign Friends, as Constitutional Convention

National Journal

The idea of putting a person to death for a murder committed at age 17 or younger strikes many of us as grotesque. So it may seem fitting that five Supreme Court justices held on March 1 that juvenile executions violate "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" — the touchstone since 1958 for determining whether punishments are unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual."

The Death-Penalty Maze

Newsweek

When State’s Attorney Douglas Gansler stepped before a gaggle of microphones in suburban Montgomery County, Md., last Friday, officials watching TV downtown at the Department of Justice seethed. Gansler, an ambitious Democrat who stressed that "Montgomery County was the community most affected" by the killing spree, announced that "within the next few hours" he would file six first-degree-murder charges against suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The Feds had asked Gansler to wait

When State’s Attorney Douglas Gansler stepped before a gaggle of microphones in suburban Montgomery County, Md., last Friday, officials watching TV downtown at the Department of Justice seethed. Gansler, an ambitious Democrat who stressed that "Montgomery County was the community most affected" by the killing spree, announced that "within the next few hours" he would file six first-degree-murder charges against suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The Feds had asked Gansler to wait while they sorted through the tricky issues of where to try the high-profile case first. Gansler was "jumping the gun," one official said.

Montgomery County and the Feds aren’t the only ones staking a claim: prosecutors in Virginia counties and Alabama also want a crack at the case. The turf wars are mo…

When State’s Attorney Douglas Gansler stepped before a gaggle of microphones in suburban Montgomery County, Md., last Friday, officials watching TV downtown at the Department of Justice seethed. Gansler, an ambitious Democrat who stressed that "Montgomery County was the community most affected" by the killing spree, announced that "within the next few hours" he would file six first-degree-murder charges against suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The Feds had asked Gansler to wait

Legal Affairs – Send the Traitor to Prison, but Don’t Execute Him

National Journal

Is John Walker a candidate for the firing squad? Or a mixed-up kid who should be sent to bed without his dessert? Measuring the known facts (and much remains unknown) of this bizarre case against laws and judicial precedents, the answer appears to be that Walker is a traitor who may be hard to convict of treason, who does not appear to deserve the death penalty (unless evidence not yet public implicates him in one or more murders), and whose case raises as many tricky legal questions as any law school exam. "It’s a devil’s brew of intricate and complex issues of U.S. criminal law, of constitutional law, of military law, and of international law," says Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

The Death Penalty Debate Intensifies

Newsweek

The federal government’s first execution in 38 years comes at a time when DNA and other evidence has exonerated enough death row inmates to shake public confidence in the system.

Timothy McVeigh–an unrepentant, confessed mass murderer whose guilt was utterly clear–deserved the death penalty if anyone ever did, and an overwhelming majority of Americans favored his execution. But according to a recent Gallup poll, support for capital punishment as an institution has slipped from a peak of 80 percent in 1994 to 65 percent this year, in part, no doubt, because falling crime rates have eased public fears. When pollsters specify life imprisonment without parole as the alternative, support for the death penalty drops to 52 percent. Most respondents do not believe that the death penalty deters murders-which is “the only reason to be for it,” President Bush said last year. “I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge,” he added.

Bush’s comments may have dismayed those whose convictions call for executing the worst killers “in order to pay them back,” in the words of Walter Berns, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, equally resolved are religious objectors and others whose morality rejects all executions as immoral and “uniquely degrading to human dignity,” in the words of the late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

Legal Affairs – Does the Death Penalty Save Innocent Lives?

National Journal

Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he’s white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I’ll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they’d sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."

Legal Affairs – Enact a Civilized Crime Bill, for a Change

National Journal

Congress and the President have a chance this year to show that they care as much about avoiding the execution (and imprisonment) of innocent defendants as they do about punishing the guilty ones. They can adopt the Innocence Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal co-sponsored by death penalty supporters and opponents who agree that you can be tough on crime without punishing innocent people. The bill would give prisoners expanded access to possibly exculpatory DNA evidence. It would also deliver-if only in capital cases-on the Supreme Court’s long-broken 1963 promise to provide indigent criminal defendants with competent trial lawyers.