The Jury's Still Out: Capital Punishment & Democracy

Beginning of article

Since the death penalty in this country is reserved for "a narrow category of the most serious crimes," usually heinous ones, it is fitting that the murders involved in this summer's two precedent-setting Supreme Court decisions are no exceptions. Daryl Atkins, whose appeal produced the Supreme Court decision banning the execution of mentally retarded murderers, had been convicted in Virginia of abduction, armed robbery, and capital murder. After a day of drinking and smoking marijuana, he and an accomplice abducted a serviceman at gunpoint, robbed him of the cash he was carrying, and drove him to an automated teller machine where they forced him to withdraw two hundred dollars. They then took him to an isolated area and--ignoring his pleas to be left unharmed--shot him eight times, killing him. Atkins had sixteen previous felony convictions, several involving wanton violence. In the penalty phase of the trial, the state of Virginia argued that Atkins was a man of "vile dangerousness."

Mustering the evidence of polling data, legislative votes, and world opinion to prove growing consensus, the Supreme Court invoked the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and …