Louisiana Supreme Court upholds death sentence for child rape
In a case that seems likely to get US Supreme Court attention, the Louisiana Supreme Court today upheld the death sentence of child rapist Patrick Kennedy in Louisiana v. Kennedy, No. 05-KA-1981 (La. May 22, 2007) (available here). Here is a snippet of the heart of the analysis of the majority opinion in Kennedy:
Looming over this case is the potential for the defendant to be the first person executed for committing an aggravated rape in which the victim survived since La. R.S. 14:42 was amended in 1995 to allow capital punishment for the rape of a person under the age of twelve. The defendant contends that Louisiana stands in a minority of jurisdictions in which legislatures have authorized capital punishment for the rape of a child not resulting in homicide and predicts that La. R.S. 14:42 is unlikely to survive the scrutiny of the United States Supreme Court, whose decisions the defendant interprets as making it clear that the loss of life is the essential component which renders capital punishment a proportionate penalty under the Eighth Amendment….
While we cannot purport to exercise the Supreme Court’s independent judgment on any matter, it can be said for child rapists as a class of offenders that, unlike the young or mentally retarded, they share no common characteristic tending to mitigate the moral culpability of their crimes. Contrary to the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders, execution of child rapists will serve the goals of deterrence and retribution just as well as execution of first-degree murderers would. Our state legislature, and this Court, have determined this category of aggravated rapist to be among those deserving of the death penalty, and, short of a first-degree murderer, we can think of no other non-homicide crime more deserving…. We affirm [our prior] reasoning [in Wilson] today and hold that the death penalty for the rape of a child under twelve is not disproportionate.
The AP has this early report on the Kennedy decision.
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