Supreme Court strikes down death penalty for child rapists

I think overall, this is probably a sound decision:

Barring the death penalty for any crime that does not take the life of an individual victim, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. If the victim does not die or death was not intended, capital punishment for that crime violates the Eighth Amendment, the Court ruled in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The primary difficulty with a case such as this one is that it is obviously extremely emotionally charged.  However, the point of law and punishment is to deal out proportional punishment in a rational fashion and not to implement a punishment based on raw emotion.

The gut emotional response to someone like a child rapist (or any rapist for many) will probably be somewhere along the lines of “that person doesn’t deserve to live.”  However, the problem with this line of thought, other than being based in emotion, is that the law isn’t necessarily meant to determine what a person deserves per se, put to implement a sentence proportional to the crime committed.

That is basically the tac the Supreme Court took today, saying that, in crimes committed against individuals, the death sentence can only be considered a proportional punishment for a crime where either death results or death is intended.  Basically the old “an eye for an eye” punishment.  Death is for death, and nothing else (though they do exempt “crimes against the state” from their ruling).

The court is saying that, while rape, and particular child rape, is a horrible crime and can have very traumatic consequences on the victim for the rest of their life, such an event doesn’t necessarily mean that the person cannot eventually live a normal life for the most part.  Given this, is it “cruel and unusual” to sentence someone to death for a crime in which the result or the intent isn’t to end another person’s life?

There is another asepct to this ruling as well: those in support of the death penalty for child rapists basically argue that the extreme psychological trauma caused justifies the death penalty.  However, this begs the question: what if someone inflicts extreme psychological trauma on someone via another means?  By this logic, such a crime should be punishable by death as well, even if no physical harm is done at all.

For example, if a child is subject to intense and cruel verbal abuse by, say, their parents for their entire childhood (but no physical abuse) which causes a child to be extremely psychologically scared, should that be punished by the death penalty?  If cruality towards children and long term psychological effects are to be the standards by which the dealth penalty can be allowed, then the answer would seem to be yes.  I think allowing the death penalty for crimes against a person in which doesn’t result and isn’t intended to result in death just opens a slippery slope that we don’t want to go down.

If death is OK for child rape, then why not for adult rape? Or for child abuse?  If it’s OK for those, why not for plain old sexual assault?  Or spousal abuse? Or any sort of physical assault for that matter?  You see where this can go.  By setting the wall at “death is meant for death,” the Supreme Court has set up a solid, non-arbitrary wall as to where the death penalty can and cannot apply.  The court starts getting into an area of ambiguity and risks setting an arbitrary bar if you start getting into defintions such as “if it’s sufficiently cruel” or things of that nature, since the definition of sufficiently cruel can be different for different people.  Death for death and only death is clear and simple.