Justices bar death penalty for child rape

WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court struck down for Eighth Amendment reasons a Louisiana law that permitted the death penalty for defendants convicted of child rape.

The Eighth Amendment bars the imposition of the death penalty for the rape of a child "where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 5-4 majority opinion issued Wednesday.

"The Court has spent more than 32 years developing a foundational jurisprudence for capital murder to guide the states and juries in imposing the death penalty," Kennedy wrote. "Beginning the same process for crimes for which no one has been executed in more than 40 years would require experimentation in an area where a failed experiment would result in the execution of individuals undeserving of death."

The ruling reversed and remanded Kennedy vs. Louisiana.

Joining Kennedy were Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Among the majority opinion's arguments was the lack of a national consensus regarding the death penalty being imposed against a convicted child rapist, which Alito said was based, in part, on only six states having such laws.

The states, Alito said, may have been "the beginning of a strong new evolutionary line. We will never know, because the Court today snuffs out the line in its incipient stage."