By AFP,
Washington : The US Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the death penalty should not apply to a man convicted of raping a child, saying that capital punishment only applies to murderers.
“The Eighth Amendment (of the US Constitution) bars Louisiana from imposing 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,” said the justices in a 5-4 decision.
In its ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the high court cited a “national consensus” reflected in the vast majority of US states that did not have laws allowing capital punishment for the crime of child rape.
Given previous court rulings and its interpretation of the US Constitution, the justices held that “the death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the crime of child rape.”
The case involved an appeal by lawyers for Patrick Kennedy, 43, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for raping the daughter of his girlfriend five years earlier, when the child was eight years old.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976, it has only been carried out for crimes of murder.
In 1977 the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a rapist, saying the punishment for the crime was excessive and fell under the constitution’s proscription of “cruel and unusual” punishment.
But in May, the Louisiana state supreme court endorsed Kennedy’s sentence, saying that the 1977 ruling applied to the rape of an adult and not of a child.
His lawyers then appealed to the country’s highest court. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissenting opinion backed by Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Calling it a “sweeping” decision, Alito wrote that the court was banning the death penalty for child rape “no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be.”
States in recent years have toughened penalties for sexual abuse of children, with the minimum jail term often set at 25 years.
Five states have set the death penalty as the maximum for the crime, though it has rarely been handed down: only one other rapist has been sentenced to death, also in Louisiana last month, a man convicted of abusing a neighbor’s daughter several times in 2004.