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Thursday, May 20, 2004

Please don’t kill me

On a more serious note, I hear that the great state of Texas is carrying on the Bush legacy, this time by executing a mentally ill man.  Now, I know this is no Abu Ghraib-- after all, unlike the unfortunates we rounded up in greater Baghdad, Kelsey Patterson seems to have been in jail for a very good reason.  But still, as CNN demurely puts it,

His lethal injection renewed the legal quandary of whether it is proper to execute someone who is mentally ill when the Supreme Court says it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is mentally retarded.

And before we take comfort in that Supreme Court decision, let’s not forget the spite and vitriol with which, two years ago, Justice “Benito” Scalia denounced the Court majority on that one.  As Benito put it:

the Prize for the Court’s Most Feeble Effort to fabricate “national consensus” must go to its appeal (deservedly relegated to a footnote) to the views of assorted professional and religious organizations, members of the so-called “world community,” and respondents to opinion polls.  I agree with the Chief Justice that the views of professional and religious organizations and the results of opinion polls are irrelevant.  Equally irrelevant are the practices of the “world community,” whose notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people.

Got that?  Let’s go over it again.  There is no consensus against executing people with mental retardation, and evidence of national and international opposition to the execution of people with mental retardation is irrelevant to the case before the Court.

Anyway, I’m not sure that Texas governor Rick Perry realizes that his job is not done yet.  In Texas, remember, if you’re the governor, after you kill someone you’re supposed to make up stories about the person you’ve executed, and then mock them.

Brought to you by Compassionate Conservatives USA.

Posted by Michael on 05/20 at 09:25 AM
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