LAST spring, Scott Keller, the solicitor general for Texas, rose to defend his state’s indefensible abortion clinic regulations at the Supreme Court. The hearing did not go well for Mr Keller—the justices struck down Texas’s rules as an unconstitutional burden on the right to abortion choice. On October 5th, Mr Keller again took the podium with an unenviable task: arguing that a black man had no claim to a new sentencing trial even though the jury that sent him to death row had heard testimony—from a defence witness, no less—that black men are particularly prone to violence.
No one disputes that Duane Buck’s crimes were violent, or vile. Mr Keller’s opening words to the justices drew immediate attention to the details of his misdeeds in 1995: “We're here today defending the death sentence because [Mr Buck] murdered a mother in front of her children”, he said. “He put a gun to the chest of his stepsister and shot her, and he murdered another man”. But the question in Buck v Davis is not how heinous these murders were. The issue is whether the decision of Mr Buck’s stunningly inept court-appointed lawyer to put a psychologist on the stand who...Continue reading
from United States http://ift.tt/2cV8Gag
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment