Death eligibility.  Anthony Kennedy is stubborn when it doesn't matter, decisive about the insignificant, and can't discern dignity from pomposity.  His unfailingly poor choice of words reflects a wandering intellect, unlike Aristotle's peripatetic contemplations, but more like senile aimlessness.  Eligibility?  I bet he joined the four humans on this court only after they said he could write for the majority in this case.  If so, then he probably believes his choice to be a principaled one. 

Splitting hairs about how old a person must be to be eligible for murder by the state?  Puhlease.  I would have more respect for the other four who joined him in this decision—Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer—if they forfeited Kennedy's 'support' and dissented with something like this:  "The death penalty, no matter the age, is abhorrent to humanity, and a poison to any society which embraces it.  We dissent." 

And Scalia was not 'scathing' in his dissent—he was embarrassing.  Scalia's contempt for all who disagree with him is a repudiation of jurisprudence; it exposes his naked venality.  I'd be insulted if he liked me.

But don't get me wrong, this decision is a step toward the enlightened society we will become one day, and regardless of the shenanigans necessary to secure this verdict, scores will be spared execution as a result.  That cannot be bad.  I just think a more direct, more honest route would cost us less in the long run. 

On the bright side; there can be no appeal.  That is both the best, and the worst thing about the Supreme Court of the United States.  When their actions are treasonable, who do you call?  Who can redress such grievances?  We had no recourse in 2000.  They have no recourse today. 

And to Lee Boyd Malvo, Christopher Simmons, and 70 others, and to scores more who would have been sentenced to death but for todays Supreme Court decision; your sentence now is life.  Like it or not.  The irony that a life sentence may be worse for some than death, is not lost on me.  But no matter how tragic, devastating, even cruel, is a sentence to spend the remainder of one's natural life in America's prisons, there is still a greater meaning for a decision to limit the death penalty, even if it fails to abolish it.  It says that we are not inhuman, and that we are capable of embracing everything with life, instead of rejecting it in death; it says we choose to make our existence inclusionary, not exclusionary; it states very simply to all evil intent lurking anywhere in the world, even anywhere in all the universe—we are not afraid.