The Injustice of Proportionality

Studies, Analysis & Opinions

Now, the Supreme Court has decided, punishment for child rapists must be "proportional." In particular, the Supreme Court - that bastion of conservatism, according to the Left - ruled this week in Kennedy v. Louisiana that child rapists could not be sentenced to the death penalty. "[T]he death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. Child molestation and other similar crimes, said Kennedy, "may be as devastating in their harm, as here, but 'in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,' they cannot be compared to murder in their 'severity and irrevocability.'"

This is nonsense of the highest order. Murder may be the most final of all crimes, but it is hardly the most severe or irrevocable. Victims of rape must live with the memory of that rape for the rest of their lives; children victimized by rape are often damaged to their dying day. ...