Supreme Court Won't Reconsider Ban on Execution for Child Rape

From The Washington Post:

The Supreme Court yesterday declined to revisit its June decision that imposing the death penalty on child-rapists is unconstitutional, although two justices said they would have reopened the case and two others sharply criticized the majority.

The state of Louisiana and the Justice Department had asked the court to reconsider the 5 to 4 decision because the justices had not been presented with what the state and federal government considered an important fact: that Congress in 2006 made child rape a capital offense under military law.

No one argued that point -- it seems none of the parties even knew it at the time -- before the majority ruled at the end of the term that there was no evidence of a national consensus in favor of putting child-rapists to death.

But that was only part of the court's reasoning. It also said that in its "independent judgment," child rape could not be compared to murder in terms of warranting the death penalty, just as the court had held that raping an adult did not merit execution.

Today, the same five justices said that the opinion would be amended to reflect the existence of the military law but that it did not bear upon their reasoning.