Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[follylama]

The sentence is "too severe" unless, of course, the perpetrator is a retarded person or teenager...

A bipartisan commission issued a string of recommendations on death penalty reform in June, including an end to the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally retarded. So far this year, five states have opted to exempt the mentally retarded from the death penalty. One of the few remaining holdouts is predictably Texas, where George Bush's replacement, governor Rick Perry, vetoed the relevant legislation.

But even in Texas, there are signs of change. Far fewer people are being sent for lethal injection than the days of Mr Bush's governorship (12 this year compared to a record 40 in 2000), and the state's court of criminal appeals took the legal profession by surprise two months ago by granting a stay of execution to Napoleon Beazley, sentenced to death for a murder committed when he was under 18.

But the Harris opinion poll contains a second, more conservative, message. As far as most Americans are concerned, miscarriages of justice do not invalidate the use of capital punishment. So the reformers hopes of chipping away at the death penalty by pointing out the flaws in the system are liable to backfire.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,547132,00.html