"Exit-Interview"; Justice John Paul Stevens

[Mr. Shaman]

It's always refreshing to hear a competent/experienced Supreme Court Justice speak their mind, when it's most-needed!!​

"In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it is possible to ensure “evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.

In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Justice Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.

But the reason for that change of heart, after more than three decades on the court and some 1,100 executions, has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Justice Stevens has provided an explanationhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28memo.html?src=twrhp.

In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.

The essay is remarkable in itself. But it is also a sign that at 90, Justice Stevens is intent on speaking his mind on issues that may have been off limits while he was on the court.

In the process, he is forging a new model of what to expect from Supreme Court justices after they leave the bench, one that includes high-profile interviews and provocative speeches.

He will be on “60 Minutes”.......”

 

[editec]

a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.

People just love drama.

And the drama they most love is the drama they get to have when being outrageously indignant about other people's transgressions.

Burn her! She's a witch!

 

[Mr. Shaman]

a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.

People just love drama.

And the drama they most love is the drama they get to have when being outrageously indignant about other people's transgressions.

I'd always assumed The Death Penalty was a tool (used) to maintain the purity of American Exceptionalism.​

The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville first wrote about it in his 1831 work, Democracy in America:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people."

 

[Ernie S.]

So a senile old man is suddenly an elder statesman... Kind of reminds me of Jimmy Carter.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

So a senile old man is suddenly an elder statesman... Kind of reminds me of Jimmy Carter.

"But when all is said and done, and many will be surprised to hear this: Jimmy Carter got more of his programs passed than Reagan, Nixon, Ford, George H. W. Bush, Clinton or George W. Bush."

'Tis true.

You'll never catch a retired-Republican doing anything productive....like Jimmy Carter....or, Bill Clinton.

Is it any wonder it's (primarily) Republicans who end-up with Alzheimers? ​

 

[Truthmatters]

They will spew hate and insults on anyone who doesnt just keep marching in their mindless parade.

 

[cutter]

You'll never catch a retired-Republican doing anything productive....like Jimmy Carter....or, Bill Clinton.


You're right, they're are like herpes, you can't get rid of them.

 

[Trajan]

"But when all is said and done, and many will be surprised to hear this: Jimmy Carter got more of his programs passed than Reagan, Nixon, Ford, George H. W. Bush, Clinton or George W. Bush."

uh huh, and how did that work out for us and him?

 

[Mr. Shaman]

BUMP!!!!

​

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Ruth pointed. Case closed