Tonight we have dissents from both Sotomayor and Breyer in the last instance of the Supreme Court waving the matador's cape for Trump's machinery of death without so much as a word of reasoned justification

Trump's DOJ has moved with unseemly haste in order to preempt credible legal challenges, and the Court has happily gone along
"This is not justice"
The Supreme Court did not meet the standard required to grant cert before a judgment by the lower court
The actual reason for the extraordinary haste is that the people have chosen a president who opposes the death penalty, and the 6 bloodthirsty Republican-nominated justices want the executions to happen. But this is not a *legal* reason.
And this is a consistent theme with Trump's flurry of last-minute executions. People are executed with important and material legal questions being unresolved because the Court won't allow them to be
The Supreme Court, without explanation, allowed the execution of two prisoners who the state allowed to get COVID-19, increasing the risk that lethal injection tortured them to death.
Brandon Bernard did not kill anybody, and almost certainly only got a capital sentence because the prosecution withheld evidence and elicited false testimony, but was unable to get these claims adjudicated before Trump, Barr, and the Roberts 6 killed him.
Two of the Trump/Barr/Roberts executions almost certainly violated the federal statutory prohibition on executing mentally handicapped people
More on Corey Johnson's case here: https://t.co/GOZEvujyrU
Two of the Trump/Barr/Roberts executions involved prisoners so mentally ill they probably didn't understand wt they were being killed, and who once again did not get a fair hearing for their claims:
A reminder that Lisa Montgomery's mental illnesses and disabilities were largely the product of having her spent her teenage years being gang-raped by her stepfather and abused and trafficked by her mother. Executing her is an unspeakably vile act https://t.co/u1IeJOBp98
The Republican majority of the Roberts Court has, quite simply, refused to adequately perform one of its gravest responsibilities because it fears a democratically elected president will not share their appetite for death. Absolutely appalling.
And keep this in mind when Republican elites give the "but muh judges" defense of supporting 4 years of Trump's depravity. What they want judges to do is stuff like "allow the state to kill a bunch of people, many of them severely mentally handicapped, without due process."
Also worth adding that Dustin Higgs also did not kill anybody. These cases illustrate the idea that the death penalty is applied only to the most serious offenders is farcical https://t.co/3NUlc402bg
Dustin Higgs has officially become the 13th person executed in a last minute flurry of arbitrary violence by the worst president in American history https://t.co/7g3poxWvyG

More from Law

You May Also Like

I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
The first ever world map was sketched thousands of years ago by Indian saint
“Ramanujacharya” who simply translated the following verse from Mahabharat and gave the world its real face

In Mahabharat,it is described how 'Maharishi Ved Vyasa' gave away his divine vision to Sanjay


Dhritarashtra's charioteer so that he could describe him the events of the upcoming war.

But, even before questions of war could begin, Dhritarashtra asked him to describe how the world looks like from space.

This is how he described the face of the world:

सुदर्शनं प्रवक्ष्यामि द्वीपं तु कुरुनन्दन। परिमण्डलो महाराज द्वीपोऽसौ चक्रसंस्थितः॥
यथा हि पुरुषः पश्येदादर्शे मुखमात्मनः। एवं सुदर्शनद्वीपो दृश्यते चन्द्रमण्डले॥ द्विरंशे पिप्पलस्तत्र द्विरंशे च शशो महान्।

—वेद व्यास, भीष्म पर्व, महाभारत


Meaning:-

हे कुरुनन्दन ! सुदर्शन नामक यह द्वीप चक्र की भाँति गोलाकार स्थित है, जैसे पुरुष दर्पण में अपना मुख देखता है, उसी प्रकार यह द्वीप चन्द्रमण्डल में दिखायी देता है। इसके दो अंशो मे पीपल और दो अंशो मे विशाल शश (खरगोश) दिखायी देता है।


Meaning: "Just like a man sees his face in the mirror, so does the Earth appears in the Universe. In the first part you see leaves of the Peepal Tree, and in the next part you see a Rabbit."

Based on this shloka, Saint Ramanujacharya sketched out the map, but the world laughed