Justices Cut Valdez Damages, Rule on Child Rape

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• RAY SUAREZ:

  Today's Supreme Court decisions eliminating the death penalty for child rape and slashing the damage award in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Here to walk us through them is NewsHour regular Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal.

  Marcia, is it unusual for the Supreme Court to strike down a state criminal penalty?

• MARCIA COYLE, National Law Journal:

  To strike down a state criminal penalty in general, it's somewhat unusual. It really depends on what the penalty is.

  And here, with the death penalty in particular, this was the first time in many years that the court was faced with what looked to be an expansion of the death penalty.

  This crime involved Patrick Kennedy, who raped his stepdaughter. She was 8 years old. And there was no question from the opinions that these justices were repulsed and horrified by the crime. He inflicted serious injuries on her.

  But as Justice Anthony Kennedy said in the majority opinion, what we're talking about here now is the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. And that protection rests on a very basic premise that the punishment has to be proportionate to the crime.

  And one way of determining that is to look at society's evolving standards of decency, as reflected one way, what states have been doing.

  He looked at the states and he found that only six states today imposed the death penalty for rape of a child. He noted that 45 jurisdictions, including the federal government, do not permit the death penalty for the rape of a child.

  He also noted that there has been no execution for rape of an adult or a child since 1964. And there are only two people on death row in the entire United States for rape of a child, which leads to evidence of a consensus against capital punishment for rape of a child.

  He also took a look at the — you know, the death penalty itself has traditionally been reserved for a narrow category of crimes that are the most serious and for offenders who are most culpable and deserving of capital punishment.

  In just recent years, the Supreme Court has found the Eighth Amendment was violated when the death penalty was imposed on juveniles and on the mentally retarded. And he said that as horrific as rape of a child is, it isn't the equivalent to murder in its severity or in its irrevocability.