The court’s new term, which starts Monday, will jump right back into high-profile constitutional battles like voting rights, affirmative action and the death penalty, as well as a new attack on public-sector labor unions.
And the justices may well agree to take up issues of abortion and contraception again, in cases that could further strip away reproductive rights.
The decisions last term showed a court willing to take into account the effects of the law on individual lives. This term, the justices have many opportunities to show that same type of awareness.
Crime and punishment
Last term, in the case of
Glossip v. Gross, which
upheld Oklahoma’s lethal-injection drug protocol, Justice Stephen Breyer
wrote in dissent that the death penalty, as it is applied today, “likely” violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Until a majority of justices come around to Justice Breyer’s view, however, the court continues to tinker with state-sponsored killing. In a handful of cases this month, the justices will consider whether death sentences in several states violate the Constitution.
The justices will
also decide whether their
2012 decision that banned mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles should apply to the more than 2,000 inmates who were sentenced before that case. Clearly, as a matter of basic fairness and legal coherence, it should.
Source: The New York Times, Editorial, October 5, 2015
