Yesterday. the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for rape of a child under 12. In Coker v. Georgia (1977), the Supreme Court held that the death penalty for rape was unconstitutional. Many commentators had interpreted the reasoning of Coker as precluding the death penalty for anything short of murder and possibly some national security offenses (treason, espionage, and the like). But Coker spoke expressly and repeatedly of rape of an adult, so the question of the death penalty for rape of a child remains open.
Yesterday’s decision follows the lead of a 1996 Louisiana Supreme Court case (State v. Wilson), but Wilson decided the question in the context of a pretrial motion, and the U.S. Supreme Court understandably — given its general preference not to review decisions before a final judgment — refused to hear the case. The new case, State v. Kennedy, upholds a death sentence, so I suspect the Supreme Court will agree to consider the issue.
The Louisiana opinion is long and detailed, and I can’t do it justice with a capsule summary; but here’s a particularly interesting passage that tries to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s death penalty methodology that was developed in the recent cases having to do with the death penalty for juveniles and the mentally retarded (one paragraph break added):
Overall, it appears that approximately 30% of capital jurisdictions (15 of 38,
including federal) authorize some form of non-homicide capital punishment, a
showing strong enough to suggest that there may be no consensus one way or the
other on whether death is an appropriate punishment for any crime which does not
result in the death of the victim. However, when the direction of change is
considered, clearly the direction is towards the imposition of capital punishment for
non-homicide crimes. As stated earlier, the number of jurisdictions allowing the
death penalty for non-homicide crimes more than doubled between 1993 and 1997.Most important to our analysis is the fact that four states have enacted laws
which capitalize child rape since Wilson, evidencing movement in the direction that
this Court thought possible back in 1996 when Wilson was decided. Looked at
another way, even after the Supreme Court decided in Coker that the death penalty
for rape of an adult woman was unconstitutional, five states nevertheless have
capitalized child rape since then, a number which the Supreme Court held in Roper
was sufficient to indicate a new consensus regarding society