Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Phillipines military finds explosives for planned Easter attacks

Reuters:

The Philippine military said on Wednesday it found eight sacks of explosives believed to have been stashed by Muslim militants for attacks in Manila during this week's Easter celebrations.

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"The explosives belonged to the ASG (Abu Sayyaf Group) and were intended for the Lenten season bombing," Pascual told reporters.

Abu Sayyaf, linked to al Qaeda and the regional militant network Jemaah Islamiah, is the smallest Muslim rebel group in the Philippines but among the deadliest after a trio of blasts in mid-February and the bombing of a ferry in early 2004.

The Phillipines is becoming an active front in the war on terror. Groveling in Iraq appears not to have been an effective weapon.


Roper v Simmons--Psychology of juvenile murders

Robert Bork:

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Trying its hand at psychology, the Roper majority argued that neither deterrence nor retribution supported the death penalty for killers under the age of 18. As for deterrence, the Court said, the likelihood that teenagers engage in cost-benefit analysis that attaches any weight to the possibility of execution is so remote as to be virtually non-existent. This in a case where the murderer counted on his minority to “get away with it.” This from a Court that finds teenage girls sufficiently mature to decide on abortion without parental knowledge or consent. Retribution was discounted on the theory that young killers, apparently without exception, are less culpable than presumably more thoughtful adult murderers. The Court ignored the fact that juries, unlike the Court, do not decide such issues categorically but by evaluation of the individual and must take youth into account as one mitigating factor.

Retribution was also ruled out without considering its indispensable role in the criminal-justice system. The mixture of reprobation and expiation in retribution is sometimes required as a dramatic mark of our sense of great evil and to reinforce our respect for ourselves and the dignity of others. None of this was examined by the Court. Its steady piecemeal restriction of the death penalty — now “reserved for a narrow category of crimes and offenders” — suggests that the Court is on a path to abolish capital punishment altogether even though the Constitution four times explicitly assumes its legitimacy.

Nor did the court consider the 100 percent effectiveness of the executed death penalty at stopping recidivism among the executed.