It was announced on the SCOTUSblog that the state of Louisiana filed a Petition for Rehearing on Monday for the case Kennedy v. Louisiana. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for a defendant convicted of raping a child violates the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court reached its decision by [...]
In a follow up to yesterday’s post, Reuters and Grits for Breakfast announced today that a Texas grand jury indicted 6 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints yesterday. The leader of the church, Warren Jeffs, was charged with sexually assaulting a child, a charge that could lead to [...]
ABC News and the ABA Journal reported today that a Massachusetts woman is being charged with child endangerment after she failed to pick up medications and take her 8 year old son to follow up treatments for his non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. At the time he was diagnosed with the disease, doctors indicated the boy would [...]
Following colleagues’ posts, Why Death Penalty Won’t End Sexual Assault: A Social Work Perspective on Kennedy v Louisiana and Supreme Court Rejects Death Penalty for Child Rape, I’ll hazard a slightly different perspective.
As is too often the case, the analysis of the opinion in the media distorts what was actually decided or even what was [...]
The nuances of the Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v Louisiana are perhaps more telling than the strict constitutionality of the ruling. The decision written by Justice Kennedy incorporates input from an amicus brief from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the Louisiana chapter of NASW, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence and [...]
