Court Rules in Favor of the Lethal Injection

This ruling is in accordance with the Rent Seeking Theory of Appellate Decisions. Had the Court ruled otherwise, all executions would have stopped. That would have stopped the huge lawyer business of appealing death penalty convictions. Each murderer is worth a $ million to both sides of the death penalty.

Here is an alternative. Three strikes, and you're dead. One, two, three convictions for a violent crime, Sayonara. The main theory supporting that approach is that the deceased have a low rate of recidivism for violent crime. That approach would also end the dilemna of the high rate of death penalty convictions of innocent people, roughly 20%. Even if the death penalty gets applied to a person innocent of the third crime, he merits the penalty by the other two violent crimes. The count should start at the earliest age tolerable to the public. Fourteen, the demarcation of biological adulthood, carries a lot of logic. This ends the injurious career of vicious people before they have had a chance to commit their hundreds of crimes a year. This is a victim safety approach. Gangs would end by attrition.

The problem is that lawyers would have no customers left. But the current balance of terror maintained by the lawyer, especially oppressive to minorities, would shift from the victim to the violent predator.