christiefan915
Catalyst
It's never too late to leave the Dark Side and come into the light. 
In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it was possible to ensure "evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law."
In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
The reason for that change of heart has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Stevens has provided an explanation.
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.
The essay is remarkable in itself. But it is also a sign that at 90, Stevens is intent on speaking his mind on issues that may have been off limits while he was on the court. He will be on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night.
The essay is actually a review of the book "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition," by David Garland, a professor of law and sociology at New York University.
Garland attributes American enthusiasm for capital punishment to politics and a cultural fascination with violence and death.
In discussing the book, 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 safeguards, Stevens wrote, it would be possible to isolate the extremely serious crimes for which death is warranted. But he said the Supreme Court has instead systematically dismantled those safeguards.
Stevens said the court took wrong turns in deciding how juries in death penalty cases are chosen and what evidence they may hear, in not looking closely enough at racial disparities in the capital justice system, and in failing to police the role politics can play in decisions to seek and impose the death penalty.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/27/MNUA1GICOL.DTL#ixzz16bydkTGj
In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it was possible to ensure "evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law."
In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
The reason for that change of heart has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Stevens has provided an explanation.
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.
The essay is remarkable in itself. But it is also a sign that at 90, Stevens is intent on speaking his mind on issues that may have been off limits while he was on the court. He will be on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night.
The essay is actually a review of the book "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition," by David Garland, a professor of law and sociology at New York University.
Garland attributes American enthusiasm for capital punishment to politics and a cultural fascination with violence and death.
In discussing the book, 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 safeguards, Stevens wrote, it would be possible to isolate the extremely serious crimes for which death is warranted. But he said the Supreme Court has instead systematically dismantled those safeguards.
Stevens said the court took wrong turns in deciding how juries in death penalty cases are chosen and what evidence they may hear, in not looking closely enough at racial disparities in the capital justice system, and in failing to police the role politics can play in decisions to seek and impose the death penalty.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/27/MNUA1GICOL.DTL#ixzz16bydkTGj
