June 20, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Okay, personally, I think that
Okay, personally, I think that executing the mentally retarded is wrong. Of course, you'd expect to hear me say that, because I'm against the death penalty. But I think that executing the mentally retarded is even more wrong; mental children should not be punished as adults.
But what is this "evolving national consensus" nonsense? If there were such a consensus, legislators wouldn't make laws that allowed it, and DA's, hyper-political creatures that they are, wouldn't prosecute. What the Supreme Court is saying is that they want the national consensus to evolve in that direction, and are therefore giving it a kickstart by imposing their consensus on everyone else.
I'm a soft communitarian: I believe in the hidden law, and that within reason, it's okay for us to get the right result with the wrong legal argument. But when the court is this high, a good result from bad legal reasoning is worse than a bad result from good reasoning, for it opens the door to an unknowable number of bad rulings to follow.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 20, 2002 7:01 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>