What one Catholic Supreme Court justice could do
By Dale S. Recinella | APRIL 28, 2008
W hen the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, our nation embarked upon a grand experiment. The hope was that new detailed procedures would result in a death penalty unaffected by the lingering racial bias of slavery and lynchings and impervious to arbitrary application. That experiment, however, has failed. DNA evidence alone has proved that some prisoners on death row were convicted of crimes they had not committed, and they have been exonerated. The question now is, How do we end the death penalty and extricate ourselves from the failed experiment?

Why Is America So Mean?

Published on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 by TedRall.com

"The 82nd," the man ahead of me in the security line at the Kansas City airport said. He was 64 and white, very Hank Hill and not the kind of guy you'd typically see chatting up a skinny 20-year-old Latino dude.
But they were both veterans. Common ground is a given." I was in the 82nd too," the kid told the old man. I looked down. The kid's legs were gone. He was standing on metal. Implausibly and heartbreakingly, white Converses adorned the tips of his prosthetic legs. High tops.

April 23, 2008

"When you have to kill a man," said Winston Churchill, "it costs nothing to be polite." When you choose to execute a condemned person, likewise, it costs little or nothing to do so without inflicting gratuitous pain. But reaching agreement on how to achieve that, as the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision upholding Kentucky's execution protocol shows, can be anything but cheap.