(no subject) [puszysty]

And you tell me the West Wing is not about politics....

I'm watching Take This Sabbath Day. They are laying on the poiltics like MAD this episode. The death penalty is wrong and immoral! Everyone at the White House is so outright offended by the idea of sentencing someone to death that they must do anything to stop it! It's just so horrible what they're doing to this man!

Ugh. Thank you Charlie for providing at least one counterpoint to all this.

Also, I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court wouldn't order an execution time that hadn't been ordered by a lower court already. The Supreme Court doesn't hear issues of guilt, it hears issues of legality. As such, the Supreme Court issues decisions, not punishment. So surely they knew this execution time was coming already, it would not have come strictly from the Supreme Court.

(And having Mendoza on the bench? Well, I don't know what the underlying issue in this supposed case was, but I can tell you, the Supreme Court would not grant an appeal solely based on the idea that they thought the death penalty was wrong. That breaches so many articles of the Constitution, it's not funny.)

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Yeah, Sorkin does tend to preach. They usually make some attempt to counterbalance this . . . with varying success.

I'm a bit confused, though; wasn't it the Supreme Court that suspended all executions by lethal injection a while back because they were investigating Eighth Ammendment concerns? I know that focused on the specific means of execution, but couldn't the court theoretically decide that capital punishment in general is unconstitutional? And if not the court, then who or what? (Not trying to be difficult, I'm just genuinely curious and very uninformed. Given that so much of the world has already outlawed capital punishment, I keep expecting it to come up.)

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Well, they could, but they would have to do it for *all* executions, not just one guy. In the case of this episode, it was one guy. And they could stay the execution, but they certainly wouldn't order one if it hadn't been already ordered.

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Also, they wouldn't just stop executing people simply because they thought it was "wrong". That's the legislature's business. The Supreme Court would need a constitutional reason. The "cruel and unusual punishment" statute is the one that comes up in debates, but I'm not sure if there's ever been a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court where someone contested that the death penalty in general, not a particular means of execution, was cruel and unusual. Kappa will probably know better than me on that one, since she's taken Con Law. :)

Thanx!

Yeah, that's pretty much in line with what I learned in ninth grade/picked up from the general media. It's been a long time since I've watched that episode, so I don't remember the specifics of the political side, except that it was fairly one-sided.

Who said TWW wasn't about politics? It totally is. But I got used to it even though I have no real interest in politics. But hang in there, it's a good show with more goodness to come!

Hee. Munch icon. :-)

I don't have much of an interest in politics either, to be honest.

I ♥ Munch.