Bloodless Coup

Just to contribute to the insanity, did you see in the WaPo today that Tom Delay came out in favor of full rights of appeal for death penalty cases:

DeLay said he did not know if it [the legislation that would transfer this case to Federal court] would mean she would be spared indefinitely. "That's not the point," he said. "The point is that Terri Schiavo should have the opportunity. We should investigate every avenue before we take the life of a living human being, and that's the very least we can do for her."

If Delay wants to "investigate every avenue before taking the life of a living human being", that would presumably mean that we should be very careful in applying the death penalty, no?

Evidently, it means that every death penalty case should gain federal court review. Granted, many do, but I think stronger legislation is called for, which relies on more than federal habeas jurisdiction (which, of course, was eviscerated roughly a decade ago, interestingly enough in the an Act the title of which adverted to securing an "Effective Death Penalty," evidently one in which access to federal review was curtailed, far from mandated).

If state courts can't be trusted to decide something as traditionally state-driven as clinical care decisions, then surely they can't be trusted to ensure adequate constitutional protections for those sentenced to be executed, which raises far more issues -- any one death penalty case will probably implicate the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, not to mention often involving Fourth Amendment questions as well.

Joshua - When I saw your phrase "which raises far more issues -- any one death penalty case will probably implicate the Fifth" ... naturally I expected the next word to be "Circuit". :)

yeah, them too.

I thought this was an interesting perspective from Katherine over at ObWi (not least because I was pondering it myself...):

I think part of the explanation of the fervor of the religious right, and of many people's failure to deal with the factual information about Terry Schiavo's medical condition, is that her condition is really horrifying to many people. It is especially horrifying from a religious perspective. The parts of Terry Schiavo's brain that have been replaced by spinal fluid are the parts that science tell us are responsible for a person's memory, thought, consciousness, emotion, personality, sense of right wrong--all of the things that make us a person, and make us different from any other person. The single word that describes this concept, in the English language, is the word "soul." The idea that a living and apparently awake human body could exist for decades without a soul is really horrifying, and a very common response to horror is to deny its existence. The idea that the soul is located in a part of the body that we can locate in a CAT scan and determine has been destroyed is a really fundamental challenge to religious teaching--a much, much, much more fundamental challenge in my view than the idea of a Big Bang or of evolution through natural selection, and we see how strongly those ideas have been resisted. If we know that the soul is located or contained in a specific part of the body, it is much harder to believe that it is really different from the body at all, or that it somehow escapes the body and rejoins God after death. It also challenges conservative Christian religious teachings about abortion and birth control: if an adult human being's soul is located in the cerebral cortex, then preventing the implantation of an embryo without any nervous tissue does not kill a human being with a soul, and aborting a fetus before it has brain waves does not kill a human being with a soul. When a situation challenges our most fundamental beliefs, we are very reluctant to acknowledge that it exists. I should also note that like all scientific findings, the idea that the soul is located in the cerebral cortex could be misused to justify horrible abuses against people whose cerebral cortex is not functioning as it does in a healthy adult, but does still exist and is still functioning at some level. But if misusing of factual or scientific information can be used to harm people, so can ignoring factual or scientific information.