07.03.08
The Bush DoJ: incompetent
The rule of incompetence continues. The GOP simply isn’t very good at governing, is it? From Linda Greenhouse at the NY Times:
In a highly unusual admission of error, the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday that government lawyers should have known that Congress had recently made the rape of a child a capital offense in the military and should have informed the Supreme Court of that fact while the justices were considering whether death was a constitutional punishment for the crime.
“It’s true that the parties to the case missed it, but it’s our responsibility,” the department’s public affairs office said in a statement.
“We regret,” the statement said, “that the department didn’t catch the 2006 law when the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana was briefed.”
In that case, decided June 25 by a vote of 5 to 4, the court ruled that the Constitution prohibits the death penalty for the rape of a child. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion was based in part on the conclusion that because child rape was a capital offense in only six states, and not under federal law, the death penalty for the crime did not meet the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges capital punishment.
Justice Kennedy’s conclusion about the absence of federal law was mistaken. Not only did Congress add child rape to the military death penalty in 2006, but President Bush, in an executive order last September, added the new provision to the current version of the Manual for Courts-Martial.
More at the link, including this: “The Justice Department statement was carefully worded to avoid conceding that under the reasoning of the Supreme Court decision, the military death penalty provision for child rape is now unconstitutional.”
