Score it Blogosphere 1, Supreme Court 0.
The NYT reports blogger Dwight Sullivan found an error in a Top Court decision undetected by the Supremes and the Justice Department. Sullivan is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion on capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied because only six states allow it — but 30 other states and no other federal jurisdiction permit it. Unfortunately, this finding was incorrect, neglecting to include the military justice system which recently revised their code.
Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court’s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. “We’re not talking about ancient history,” he said in an interview. “This happened in 2006.”
Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it. The Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, did not even file a brief, evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisiana’s death penalty for child rape was constitutional.
Source: NYT July 1, July 2; CAAFLOG Blog