The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a pair of wise decisions Wednesday, banning the death penalty in the case of rapists who don’t kill their victims and placing an upper limit on punitive damage awards in some civil cases.
Justice Anthony Kennedy buttressed his reputation as the new swing vote on the high court by writing the 5-4 decision sparing Patrick Kennedy (no relation, obviously) from becoming the first person since 1964 to be executed in the U.S. for a crime other than murder. Kennedy was convicted of raping his 8-year- old stepdaughter.
“The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” Kennedy wrote for the court in striking down a Louisiana law allowing execution in such cases.
Kennedy’s vote was decisive because the court otherwise split along its usual ideological fault line, with liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joining the majority and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissenting.
The Denver Post has long opposed the death penalty. But even citizens who support capital punishment should recognize that the Louisiana law was an atrocious example of vengeance without reason, since it violated the Judeo-Christian tradition that punishment should be proportionate to a crime, not more severe than the crime itself.
As The Post argued earlier this year in opposing a failed attempt by state Sen. Steve Ward, R-Littleton, to authorize the death penalty in Colorado for the rape of a child, such disproportionate punishment violates the biblical standard: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
In another widely watched ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court also slashed the $2.5 billion punitive damages award in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill to $500 million. This case scrambled the court’s usual right-left division, with Souter joining Ken- nedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas in ruling that the punitive damages in the case may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, $507.5 million — an amount equal to about four days’ worth of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s profits last quarter. Alito abstained because he owns Exxon stock.
We welcome the ruling because we’ve long felt there should be some reasonable limit on non-economic damages in civil cases — if only because outrageous awards are ultimately passed on to consumers as part of the cost of doing business.
It remains to be seen, however, how far-reaching Wednesday’s ruling will be. The 1-to-1 ratio between punitive and actual damages in the Exxon ruling is far lower than the 9-to-1 ratio blessed by the high court in an earlier decision involving State Farm Insurance. Plaintiffs’ attorneys said the Exxon decision may have limited application, because it applies in the specialized area of maritime law.
