This George Will column (about this story) hits the mark in most ways. A man was sentenced to death after a gruesome crime, but the ultra-leftist Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the case. The Supreme Court then overturned the Ninth.

According to the story:

“At the [1979] trial, defense witnesses praised his conduct while he was being held in the manslaughter case, including his work on a fire crew. A California Youth Authority chaplain called Belmontes a ’salvageable person’ who could live a productive life in prison.”

And according to the column:

“Belmontes’ attorney asked the trial judge to specifically instruct the jury to consider Belmontes’ ability to live acceptably in prison. Instead, the judge used California’s ‘catchall mitigation instruction,’ which was declared constitutional in 1990. It tells a jury weighing capital punishment that it can consider many things (e.g., the use of force or violence, the defendant’s age, any extreme mental or emotional disturbance, prior felony convictions). Belmontes’ case turned on whether the jury understood one provision of the catchall instruction — to consider ‘any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime’ — to include the ‘forward-looking’ consideration that life imprisonment might be a suitable punishment.”

That is one bad policy. Instead of debating, “forward-looking” and with deference to “good behavior” in jail, whether life in prison might be suitable for this individual, why not ask (A) does the punishment fit the crime and (B) are there any real mitigating factors to do with the crime, like mental disorder or infidelity, where the average person might lose control? If the answers are yes and no, let’s get a needle ready before 25 years pass and a lawyer comes up with some lame excuse.

That said, I think Will overstates his (somewhat joking) case about the Ninth Circuit being so bad, and so out of line with other courts, that we need a second Supreme Court just to reverse it. The real Supreme Court only knocked down the Ninth’s decree by a 5-4 margin. The Ninth may have an absurd sympathy for criminals, but the Supremes aren’t too far behind.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.