Posted on: Tuesday, September 10, 2002

EDITORIAL
Time for a new look at the death penalty

It's mildly encouraging that three U.S. Supreme Court justices have publicly expressed a desire to take a new look at the death penalty, as it is applied to teenagers.

Now, a Texas inmate had asked the high court to delay his execution and consider whether such executions are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. By a 6-3 vote, the request was turned down and Toronto Patterson, convicted of killing a 3-year-old girl when he was 17, died by lethal injection.

That's a shame, but the dissent by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer offers hope that momentum is growing, if not for abolishing the death penalty altogether, at least to chip away at some of its darkest ramifications.

Only Stevens says he favors abolishing the death penalty for minors. Ginsburg and Breyer say they favor a review.

But the ruling for the mentally handicapped may be the narrow edge of a wedge. We hope to see the day when the obvious about the death penalty, for any defendant, is recognized — that it is cruel and unusual. Its re-establishment in 1977 should never have been allowed.