Rethinking capital punishment | The Week

WHAT HAPPENED A judge on Wednesday rejected California’s new lethal injection method, adding to doubt over the future of the death penalty in the state. A day earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court

granted a stay of execution for a Mississippi prisoner, Earl W. Berry, who was scheduled to be executed for the murder of a woman 20 years ago. Legal experts interpreted the decision as a

signal to lower courts that the justices planned to block all executions until next year, when they will rule on a Kentucky case over whether the mix of drugs that state uses to put

prisoners to death constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. WHAT THE COMMENTATORS SAID SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from

multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE WEEK'S FREE NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered

directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Berry’s stay “strengthened” the “de facto

moratorium on the death penalty,” said David R. Dow in _The Washington Post_ (free registration). Executions have already been halted in Virginia and Texas since the Sept. 25, when the

Supreme Court announced it would hear the Kentucky case. But, for some reason, the justices refused to intervene in a Texas case that came before them hours after the moratorium began. But

that’s “typical of the arbitrariness and brazen disregard for legal principle that characterizes most death penalty cases.” Death penalty cases also “cost a lot,” said Georgia State

University law professor Anne Emanuel in _The Atlanta Journal-Constitution_. That’s why a Georgia judge has had to approve a defense budge of $1.2 million and counting for Brian Nichols, who

has confessed to killing a judge, a court reporter, a deputy sheriff, and a customs agent in 2005. It’s hard to stomach taking millions from taxpayers to defend someone who has “outraged us

and broken our hearts,” but the alternative is “putting someone on trial for his life” without the resources to defend himself. The moratorium won’t last forever, said Jonathan Simon of the

University of California—Berkeley School of Law in his _Governing through Crime_ blog. “Even if the current method of lethal injection is found wanting, it is likely that some altered

method will ultimately prove acceptable.” But going for months without executions will certainly fire up state politicians, who love to “blame the courts for favoring the interests of

murderers over victims” and stir up “the public's darkest fears of crime.” “Stop quibbling about how, and why and with what method to do it,” said the _Detroit Free Press_ in an

editorial, “and begin talking forthrightly about whether the greatest nation on Earth ought to engage in behavior that you have to visit Tehran or Rangoon to see elsewhere.” A free daily

email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com