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.

By GILBERT KING

THE Supreme Court concluded last week, in a 7-2 ruling, that Kentucky's three-drug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts cited a Supreme Court principle from a ruling in 1890 that defines cruelty as limited to punishments that "involve torture or a lingering death."

States must decide speed of lethal injections

COLUMBUS - The prosecution of Ohio's death penalty cases received a boost yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's similar lethal injection procedure.

The decision, however, does not necessarily quash the claims of a group of Ohio death row inmates who argue that Ohio's lethal injection procedure violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. There are roughly 20 inmates who are close to having execution dates set.

The US supreme court has ruled that lethal injection does not violate the constitution. States are now competing to reschedule delayed executions

Yesterday, in a splintered and chaotic decision producing seven separate (and occasionally vitriolic) opinions from the nine justices, the US supreme court again opened the floodgate that has been holding back the death penalty, ruling that lethal injections as currently administered were not unconstitutional.