Death penalty banned for child rapists

Only six states allow such executions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — No crime against an individual short of murder, not even the brutal rape of a child, merits the death penalty, the Supreme Court said in a ruling that drew criticism across the political spectrum.

In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down a Louisiana law Wednesday that allows rapists to be executed if their victims are children.

Louisiana’s Republican governor denounced the ruling. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he, too, disagrees with it.

The decision added a wrinkle to the court’s death penalty law, further limiting who may be executed in the same term it upheld executions by lethal injection. The outcome in the lethal injection case rested partly on the rationale that because capital punishment itself is constitutional, there must be some way to carry it out.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion Wednesday, said that however devastating the crime to children, “the death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child.” His four liberal colleagues joined him, while the four more conservative justices dissented.

The court in recent years has barred executions for the mentally retarded and people younger than 18 when they committed murder.

Wednesday’s ruling spares the only people in the U.S. under sentence of death for child rape — two Louisiana men convicted of raping girls aged 5 and 8.

It also invalidates laws on the books in five other states that allowed executions for raping a child.

There has not been an execution in the United States for a crime that did not also involve the death of the victim in 44 years, a factor that weighed in Justice Kennedy’s decision.

Rape and other crimes “may be as devastating in their harm, as here, but ‘in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,’ they cannot be compared to murder in their ‘severity and irrevocability,’” Justice Kennedy said, quoting from earlier decisions.

The victim in the case decided Wednesday was an 8-year-old girl raped by her stepfather at their home in Harvey, La., outside New Orleans.

Angry Louisianans who backed the law said the court was out of touch.

“The opinion reads more like an out-of-control legislative debate than a constitutional analysis,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. “One thing is clear: The five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same ‘standards of decency’ as the people of Louisiana.”

Obama said the decision’s blanket prohibition on punishing the rape of a child by death went too far.

Justice Kennedy dwelt at length on the need to limit the death penalty to the most heinous killings.

The decision allows death sentences to continue to be imposed for crimes such as treason, espionage and terrorism, which Justice Kennedy labeled as crimes against the state.

The Supreme Court banned executions for rape in 1977 in a case in which the victim was an adult woman.

Forty-four states prohibit the death penalty for any kind of rape, and five states besides Louisiana have allowed it for child rapists — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.

The court struggled over how to apply standards laid out in the earlier rulings on the mentally retarded and young killers. In those cases, the court cited trends in the states away from capital punishment.

In this case, proponents of the Louisiana law said the trend was toward the death penalty, a point mentioned by Justice Samuel Alito in his dissent.

“The harm that is caused to the victims and to society at large by the worst child rapists is grave,” Justice Alito wrote. “It is the judgment of the Louisiana lawmakers and those in an increasing number of other states that these harms justify the death penalty.”

But Justice Kennedy said the absence of any recent executions for rape and the small number of states that allow it demonstrate “there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape.”