Supreme Court overrules on Kennedy c. Louisiana; rules that death penalty cannot be applied for rape of a child. (See update.)

SCOTUSblog also points out that the Court ruled in the matter of Kennedy v. Louisiana today. The case involves a lower court ruling upholding a Louisiana law that allowed for the death penalty in cases of child rape. The Court reversed that ruling, declaring that the 8th Amendment prohibits such laws.

You can read SCOTUSblog’s liveblog here. The decision was a 5-4 deal with Justice Alito, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas dissenting. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion.

I think this one was wrongly decided, too. The majority opinion is that the 8th Amendment keeps a law from being passed and applied that applies the death penalty in a crime against an individual where the victim doesn’t die and death was not intended. I gotta tell you, I can think of all kinds of situations where a victim can be put through an experience far worse than death. I don’t know the condition of the victim in this case, but it’s easy to imagine the kind of trauma, physical and mental, that a child being brutally raped would undergo. The damage, physically, can easily be debillitating for life. To suggest that just because the child survived via the grace of God that the perp should somehow be protected from society exacting the maximum penalty for the act just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I wish I could feel shocked by the decision, however. Given how the vote went, I’m unsurprised.

Update: This decision was worse than I thought. Michelle Malkin has the information on this case and a more realistic sense of just what Justice Kennedy and the liberal bloc on the Court has wrought.