Brooke Simpson-Supreme Court Won't Hear Challenges to Arizona's Death Penalty Law

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/supreme-court-death-penalty.html

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Challenges to Arizona’s Death Penalty Law

            The Supreme Court turned down another request to look into the constitutionality of the death penalty and the request to consider is Arizona’s capital sentencing system violates the Constitution.  Justice Stephen Breyer has urged the other justices to consider it, saying that it could violate the Eighth Amendment, especially because innocent people have been killed and the system can be very discriminatory.  Four justices have said they agree that Arizona’s punishment system is unconstitutional, which makes almost all murderers eligible for the death penalty.  Critics say that the system doesn’t make much differentiation between the worst offenders and others, 98% of murderers.  Killing someone else is beyond my imagination, but it sounds like the system sees all murderers the same, which some people do and some people don’t.  A man named Abel Hidalgo was hired to murder another man, plead guilty, and was sentenced to death because he had killed in exchange for money, committed multiple homicides, and committed another serious crime.  His lawyers found information about 860 first-degree murder cases in one county in Arizona and practically all of them were eligible for the death penalty.  Many people think the death penalty should stay, many think it should be abolished, but there is something wrong with Arizona and I think that it would be hard to turn a blind eye to that.

            The article was written by Adam Liptak on March 19, 2018, for the New York Times.  The article was written for all Americans, and it is pretty biased against the death penalty.  The article is important because it shows that there are some Supreme Court Justices on both sides of the death penalty argument, but the cases aren’t getting through to the Supreme Court.  The article can be compared to times in history when the court has rejected human’s rights cases, which happens from time to time because the Supreme Court can’t hear every case.  In 2005 the Supreme Court chose not to hear a Voting Rights Case, which was also dealing with criminals (but these were former criminals and had committed less severe crimes).