More on the Supreme's Juvenile Death Penalty

Not to say I am for or against juvenile death penalty, but this decision looks worse the more I look at it. The decision didn't face proper adversarial debate on the studies that were used to show juveniles should be considered outside the norms of responsibility for heinous acts.

Only 19 states allow the juvenile death penalty, and those states rarely use it, justices said. They cited "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society to determine which punishments are so disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual."

In the minority dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia accused other justices of cherry-picking studies that supported their views and disputed that a national consensus exists. The appropriateness of capital punishment should be determined by individual states, he said, not "the subjective views of five members of this court and like-minded foreigners."

And

He said that the majority "looks to scientific and sociological studies, picking and choosing those that support its position. It never explains why those particular studies are scientifically sound; none was ever entered into evidence or tested in an adversarial proceeding."

I don't give a hoot about the like-minded foreigners, other than their input should be irrelevant. I do think this falls flat on its face when the studies aren't even cited much less brought to debate.

The St.Petersburg Times has some further excerpts from the case, and an interesting side bar about how several of the juvenile offender cases, that were death penalty cases, will soon be eligible for parole.