We'll know within the year if we can require the same standard of proof of identity to vote that we do for cashing checks or getting on airplanes.

With the 2008 presidential and Congressional elections on the horizon, the Supreme Court agreed today to consider whether voter-identification laws unfairly keep poor people and members of minority groups from going to the polls.

The justices will hear arguments from an Indiana case, in which a federal district judge and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in January upheld a state law requiring, with certain exceptions, that someone wanting to vote in person in a primary or general election present a government-issued photo identification. Presumably, the court would rule on the case by June.

I think the rulings of the appellate court judges in this case are interesting because they are both correct. Especially this point by the Democrat judge who wrote the dissent in the case.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” [Judge Terence T. Evans] wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”

Quite true. Having grown up outside of Chicago, I readily affirm that my support for such laws is based upon my explicit and conscious desire to disenfranchise certain key Democrat constituencies.

Dead-Americans.

Fantasy-Americans.

Felon-Americans.

"Not American Citizen"-Americans.

After all, those groups have been key to influencing elections and preventing GOP victories for years. And I believe that keeping members of these groups from voting violates nobody's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment -- especially when the necessary identification documents are available free to American citizens under the voter ID laws.

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That should settle matters, as the method of execution was one which the founders clearly viewed as not being “cruel and unusual punishment” due to its ubiquity at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

Such a course of action would clearly undo the ponderous jurisprudence of the Supreme Court on the death penalty, and what methods of execution are permissible.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injections in a case that could affect the way inmates are executed around the country.

The high court will hear a challenge from two inmates on death row in Kentucky — Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. — who sued Kentucky in 2004, claiming lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

Baze has been scheduled for execution Tuesday night, but the Kentucky Supreme Court halted the proceedings earlier this month.

The U.S. Supreme Court has previously made it easier for death row inmates to contest the lethal injections used across the country for executions.

But until Tuesday, the justices had never agreed to consider the fundamental question of whether the mix of drugs used in Kentucky and elsewhere violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

All 37 states that perform lethal injections use the same three-drug cocktail, but at least 11 states suspended its use after opponents alleged it was ineffective and cruel. The three drugs consist of an anesthetic, a muscle paralyzer, and a substance to stop the heart. Death penalty foes have argued that if the condemned prisoner is not given enough anesthetic, he can suffer excruciating pain without being able to cry out.

Personally, though, I have to note that the entire debate over the constitutionality of any given form of the death penalty seems to be absurd to me. Look at the terms. Capital Punishment. Death Penalty. The goal is not to rehabilitate or show mercy – it is to exact retribution for the misdeeds of the condemned. The time has come, quite frankly, to get over the misguided notion that these folks have a right to experience no pain or suffering as they are executed. Maybe a little pain and suffering would even be good for their souls – or perhaps a foretaste of what they will experience for all eternity.

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I can't help but note this fine profile of Justice John Paul Stevens. I encourage folks to read it -- and will likely assign it to my students the next time I teach US Government. It gives a fine insight into a complex jurist of the highest caliber -- though one with whom I often disagree on the outcome and reasoning of cases.

But I'm struck by this story.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1941, Stevens enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later won a bronze star for his service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on RooseveltÂ’s orders, shot down YamamotoÂ’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately. He has been the most outspoken critic of the death penalty on the current court.

One can look at the death penalty from many different points of view, and this is one upon which I differ with Stevens -- particularly because the death penalty is clearly authorized in the Eighth Amendment, and therefore unambiguously constitutional. But his view on the intentional, targeted killing of Yamamoto strikes me as misplaced.

Yes, killing a random soldier or sailor is in some ways different from making a particular officer a target, with the intent of ending his life. But for all his Stevens' moral qualms, I think it is important to remember that military commanders, not just the man in the trenches, are legitimate targets. There really is no moral distinction between the two. And I wonder -- would he feel the same had he instead helped locate Hitler and therefore brought about the demise of that evil man (and likely the end of the war)?

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But not the one that Toobin tries to reveal in regards to the Bush v. Gore decision.

O’Connor was clearly Toobin’s most important source. She’s also — readers can decide if it’s coincidental — his hero: the justice, he argues, who through her pragmatic, seat-of-the-pants jurisprudence single-handedly kept the court close to the American mainstream, particularly on matters like reproductive freedom and affirmative action.

Excuse me -- court decisions, especially Supreme Court decisions, are not supposed to be based upon considerations like the political opinions of the majority of Americans or a judge's views of the same. They are supposed to be rooted in precedent, law, and the Constitution. If the picture painted by Jeffrey Toobin (and characterized above by reviewer David Margolick) is correct, Sandra Day O'Connor was unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court and performed her duties in an unfit manner for nearly a quarter of a century. It explains what I have long pointed out in my college level American government classes -- the lack of a clearly consistent jurisprudence on O'Connor's part. She is too busy trying to shape policy based upon some majoritarian impulse more appropriate to the Legislative or Executive branches.

As one of my students noted in a paper some years ago, an O'Connor opinion (especially when compared to those of her fellow justices) often seemed to be a conclusion in search of reasoning to support it. Now we know why.

Oh, one other comment on a Toobin tidbit discussed in the review.

Why were OÂ’Connor and Stevens the only colleagues the dying Rehnquist allowed into his home? And who most regularly persuades whom (if, on such a factionalized court, thereÂ’s any persuasion going on at all)?

Simple -- O'Connor and Rehnquist had known each other since their days at Stanford Law School (it is even suggested that there might have been a few dates). Stevens and Rehnquist had become fast friends in the latter's early days on the Court and worked together for some 30 years. The rest of the justices were at least a decade younger and had a decade less service on the Court -- and had all come aboard AFTER (or in Scalia's case, concurrent with) Rehnquist's move to the center chair on the bench. Their relationships were therefore different from the rest.

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I asked a question yesterday, following the arrest of OJailed Simpson.

An interesting question arises, though. To what degree can the 1994 murders be taken into account at sentencing -- OJ was found not guilty in the criminal trial, but legally culpable in the civil trial. Can the latter be used as evidence of a history of criminal activity (especially when paired with is abuse of Nicole) to move his sentence to the higher end of the range?

Well, I got an answer today over at the Volokh Conspiracy, courtesy of Eugene Volokh himself.

The gist of the answer? Yes -- and so can the criminal case itself, despite the acquittal.

Simpson has been found guilty by a civil jury of killing his ex-wife and Ron Goldman. (If I'm not mistaken, the jury's award of punitive damages involved a finding of guilt by clear and convincing evidence, though I don't think this is necessary to my analysis.) It's possible -- I'm not sure -- that a judge could simply rely on this past finding; but a judge could certainly enter such a finding himself based on his own review of the evidence.

And given this finding about Simpson's past conduct and therefore his moral character, the judge would be legally allowed to impose a higher sentence than he would on a typical robber, burglar, or what have you. I'm not sure whether a judge would indeed act this way; but the federal Constitution would let him act this way if he so chose.

In other words, we may be seeing OJailed getting the entire 30 years if he is convicted on all counts. And since he is 60 now, that would pretty well constitute a life sentence. Ron and Nicole may get some justice after all.

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George W. Bush nearly had a chance to correct one of his father's biggest mistakes.

Unfortunately, friends persuaded David Souter to stay on the Supreme Court.

According to Jeffrey Toobin's new book on the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter nearly resigned in the wake of Bush v. Gore, so distraught was he over the decision that effectively ended the Florida recount and installed George W. Bush as president.

In "The Nine," which goes on sale Sept. 18, Toobin writes that while the other justices tried to put the case behind them, "David Souter alone was shattered," at times weeping when he thought of the case. "For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice," Toobin continues. "That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same."

Sadly, what we see here is that we have an emotionally unstable individual on the Supreme Court. Would that there were some way to remove him for the good of America.

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Mike Nifong again gets off too easy.

Embattled former district attorney Mike Nifong was held in criminal contempt of court and sentenced to one day in jail Friday for his actions in the flawed Duke lacrosse team rape case.

Nifong must report to jail September 7, Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III said.

The judge said Nifong's withholding of DNA evidence from defense attorneys was an affront to the integrity of the judicial system.

The evidence potentially would have cleared the three lacrosse players of sexual assault charges months before North Carolina's attorney general dropped them in April.

The players initially were accused of raping an exotic dancer during a party last year.

The specific evidence Nifong was accused of withholding was that DNA profiles found on the alleged rape victim were from unidentified males, but did not match any of the 46 lacrosse team members.

He also was accused of telling the court in a September 22 hearing that a lab report contained complete information on DNA test results, when it omitted that information.

Given that the entire investigation and prosecution was a travesty, designed to boost Nifong's election campaign rather than achieve justice, a one-day sentence is absurdly short.

Instead, Nifong needs to be imprisoned for the exact length of time each of these young men was forced to bear these false accusations -- with the time to be served consecutively.

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