Noted.

SHARPEN THOSE PENCILS: The Nation is holding its annual Student Writing Contest. We're looking for original, thoughtful student voices to answer this question: what have you learned from a personal experience that the next President should know before setting the agenda for the country? Winners will receive $1,000, and their essays will be published in The Nation. The contest is open to high school and college students. Deadline is May 31. Go to TheNation.com/student for info.

A LETHAL DECISION? Amid a grueling presidential primary season and an especially brutal week in Iraq, the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees was a one-day news blip. Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol has been found legal; executions around the country may resume. No presidential campaign issued a statement; no reporter asked the candidates for their views on whether a medical cocktail banished by veterinarians as too cruel for animal euthanasia is suitable for killing humans.

Yet there was real importance in Baze. Start with Justice John Paul Stevens, who in 1976 was part of the seven-vote majority who restored capital punishment. Stevens took the occasion of Baze to declare that thirty-two years ago he was wrong: the death penalty is, in fact, "patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment." At age 88, Stevens has joined two of his colleagues from 1976 in a twilight conversion: Harry Blackmun, who renounced "the machinery of death" in one of his last rulings, and Lewis Powell, who came to the same conclusion after he retired. Why it took them so long is a matter for biographers, but the curious historical fact is that--with Stevens's change of heart--if the 1976 Supreme Court were resurrected and asked to vote again, the death penalty would lose, 5-4.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.