Supreme Court justice:
Next big death penalty issue could be age

LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent Thursday, July 18, 2002 ©2002 Associated Press

(07-18) 17:37 PDT CORONADO, Calif. (AP) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the landmark ruling exempting the retarded from death sentences, says the next big capital punishment issue may be how young is too young to be executed.

But that question and others related to the death penalty are likely to be resolved by legislation, and not through the courts, he told a gathering of judges Thursday from the U.S. Ninth U.S. Circuit, the largest judicial district in the nation.

DNA research, Stevens said, is inspiring more concern across the country about the possibility of wrongly executing people.

"There is more interest in making sure that the death penalty is appropriately applied," said the associate justice, who at 82 is the oldest of the Supreme Court's nine members.

Stevens declined to be interviewed afterward about his remarks. During his participation in a panel discussion with U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, he also declined to discuss the court's ruling last month allowing tuition vouchers for children who attend private schools.

The 5-4 ruling allows taxpayer money to underwrite tuition at private or parochial schools if parents retain a wide choice of options on where to send their children. Like other recent rulings led by the court's conservative majority, the case allows blending of government and religion.

Stevens, who voted with the minority, complained that the ruling could increase the risk of strife and "remove a brick from the walls separating church and state."

"I hope I'm wrong, and because I hope so fervently that I'm wrong I would rather not speak about it," he said.

Olson explained the Bush administration's support of vouchers, saying: "The president believed that alternatives to public education should be explored. ... We thought it was in the best interest of the country that school districts move forward with a clear vision of what would be constitutional."

Both Stevens and Olson commented briefly on the Supreme Court's Florida election recount case, which gave the contested 2000 presidential election to Bush over Al Gore by refusing to allow for the completion of disputed vote recounts in Florida, the state whose narrow vote for Bush decided the election.

Stevens, who was also on the losing side of that 5-4 decision, said in his dissent that the ruling "effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters" and that it threatened to damage the public's confidence in the judicial system as well.

He said Thursday he hoped that when historians examine the ruling some consideration would be given to what he called the extraordinary work done by lawyers who "disagreed without being disagreeable."

Olson, who was among the Republican lawyers whose arguments prevailed, recalled it as the most intense case he ever worked on, adding that it was also the quickest resolution of such a case he'd ever seen the Supreme Court make.

©2002 Associated Press