Why Don't Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?
/If you spend any time at all studying the death penalty in America today you eventually come across an immutable truth: No one who digs deeply into these grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice. The movement, over the past 40 years anyway, has almost always been in the opposite direction: The closer one gets to capital punishment, the more dubious it appears to be.
This has been particularly true of Supreme Court justices since the death penalty was resurrected in America in 1976: The closer these esteemed jurists have gotten to "the machinery of death," the more flawed convictions and death sentences they were forced to review, the more racial inequality they saw in its application—and the more likely they were to recoil from the arbitrary imposition of capital punishment in those states that still practiced it.
This is just one of the many important takeaways from the book of the year about the death penalty, Evan Mandery's work titled "A Wild Justice: The Death And Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America." I will have more on the book—as well as an online interview with Mandery—in a related post tomorrow here at The Atlantic. But for now let us focus on four Republican-appointees to the Supreme Court and the impact their decades-long focus upon capital cases had upon their judicial philosophies toward executing condemned murderers.
