After keeping him in prison for literally half his life, Georgia executed a 72 year old man.

[Uponthegears]

157. Do not take this personally

But the size of the cabal of pro-death penalty zealots on a site that proclaims itself as a meeting place for liberals is beyond disgusting. I may get back to the BS about "deterrence" and "justice" and "the victims," but let's start with the amateur lawyers.

For those constitutional law experts who talk about how many times the death penalty has been held to be constitutional, here's a little history. In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the death penalty was held to violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments based upon the fact that the states had enacted inadequate safeguards to prevent its arbitrary application AND that this arbitrariness had resulted in its disproportionate application against people of color, something a plurality held was no longer acceptable in a civilized world. AFTER RIGHT WING JUSTICES (just so you people know whose hand you are holding) took over the court, it revisited the issue based on (what would have seemed to anyone who had read Furman) an argument that had addressed ONLY the issue of the safeguards, but said NOTHING about the fact that the death penalty remained centered on the concept that only "white lives matter." For a pack of RIGHT WING JUSTICES, though, it was good enough. It was only 3-4 years later that the RIGHT WING COURT said that it no longer gave a FRA about whether the death penalty was nothing more than racist BS and would not even allow evidence of systemic racism to be introduced. Since then, the constitutionality of the death penalty has never been analyzed, although RIGHT WING JUSTICE AFTER RIGHT WING JUSTICE have taken every opportunity to declare it constitutional. For all you applauding their intellectually dishonest tripe, let me tell you what the current RIGHT WING JUSTICE THEORY is on why the death penalty is constitutional . . . THEY claim that the Eighth Amendment's express prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment means exactly NOTHING more than that a capital defendant get a "fair trial" Their "logic" in holding that the Eighth Amendment has no independent meaning is, "because capital punishment was mentioned in the 5th Amendment, it can NEVER be found unconstitutional (even if we were to become the only nation in the entire world still doing it). THAT is pure idiocy.