Evidently, Kennedy and Breyer felt strongly enough about the issues of solitary confinement and capital punishment to break from that tradition.
.. As Kennedy noted, an estimated twenty-five thousand inmates in the United States are currently serving their sentences in solitary confinement—a condition in which the prisoner is generally held, as Kennedy put it, “in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day.” The hour each day when prisoners are allowed out, to shower or exercise, is also usually in isolation. This practice deprives individuals of almost all human contact, other than with guards. Some prisons go even further. According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania are not allowed to have photographs of family members, or newspapers and magazines (unless the periodicals are religious).
.. But, in 1972, the Court did declare the death penalty—as it was then administered—unconstitutional, reasoning that the imposition of death, at the time left to the unfettered discretion of prosecutors and juries, rendered the sanction so arbitrary as to be cruel and unusual. As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.”
.. What’s more, Breyer noted, defendants today routinely spend decades on death row while their cases are reviewed. That lengthy period of intense uncertainty, nearly always spent in solitary confinement, adds to the cruel and unusual character of capital punishment.
The Campaign and the Court
Mike Huckabee vowed that he “will not acquiesce to any imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch.”
.. Cruz is pressing forward with his plan to provide “the means [of] throwing off judicial tyrants”: a constitutional amendment that would subject Supreme Court justices to a national “retention election” every eight years.
.. Cruz is not just posturing; he is stoking a pervasive and potentially destructive strain of anti-court sentiment within the G.O.P. He is not just attacking particular opinions or judges; he is attacking the judiciary itself as inherently unrepresentative, unaccountable, and in need of restraint. The same mindset can be seen in Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s threat to wipe out funding for the state judiciary if the state Supreme Court defies him and strikes down a law restricting its own authority.
John Roberts’s Court
He and five other Justices rejected the challenge before the Court on its merits, but some Court-watchers believe that he also voted as he did for the same reason that he cast the decisive vote in upholding the Affordable Care Act in 2012. As the influential federal appeals-court judge Richard Posner put it then, the judgment to allow the statute to stand was “based to a significant extent on the hammering the court would have taken had it struck the law down.” The Court was in the national spotlight, and its legitimacy as a national institution was at stake.
..
To find a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, he argued, the Court’s precedents require that it be “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Same-sex marriage is not rooted in those ways, so the Constitution cannot be read to compel it: “The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition.”
Roberts makes a forceful case for judicial self-restraint – for unelected federal judges not reading meaning into the Constitution based on their personal preferences.
..Alito responded to each of Sotomayor’s points, but primarily made a different argument: that the Constitution’s cruel-and-unusual-punishment clause “does not require the avoidance of all risk of pain.”
.. Breyer summarized more than a generation of evidence indicating that states can swiftly impose the death penalty, as the ultimate form of vengeance on behalf of the community. Or they can attempt to apply it reliably, consistently, and fairly—which does not satisfy the urge for vengeance and is much crueler to death-row inmates, who are usually kept for long stretches in solitary confinement. But they cannot do both.
.. Scalia lampooned, “Welcome to Groundhog Day” and then derided, “A vocal minority of the Court, waving over their heads a ream of the most recent abolitionist studies (a superabundant genre) as though they have discovered the lost folios of Shakespeare, insist that now, at long last, the death penalty must be abolished for good.”
Money, Dogs, and Diligence: How to Catch an Escaped Prisoner
Texas is so successful because they have packs of dogs and when the dogs get tired they pick one up and put another pack down. They’ve got people on horseback with the dogs. It’s a major difference [between Texas and New York use of tracking dogs]. Having seven dogs as opposed to one dog looking for them is a lot better.