Shocker: Alito Isn't a Robot; Sides With Liberals on First Day

Thursday, February 02, 2006

With all the harping coming from the Left about Alito bringing his own agenda to the Supreme Court, and the nonstop assurances that he was a "right-wing extremist" who never sided with the little guy, Justice Alito voted in his first decision on his first day on the Supreme Court...to side with the little guy:

New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito split with the court's conservatives Wednesday night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri's last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.

An appeals court will now review Taylor's claim that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, a claim also used by two Florida death-row inmates that won stays from the Supreme Court over the past week.

Scalia and Thomas have consistently sided with states in death penalty cases and have been especially critical of long delays in carrying out executions.

Taylor was convicted of killing 15-year-old Ann Harrison, who was waiting for a school bus when he and an accomplice kidnapped her in 1989. Taylor pleaded guilty and said he was high on crack cocaine at the time.

Taylor's legal team had pursued two challenges — claiming that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment and that his constitutional rights were violated by a system tilted against black defendants.

So Alito isn't a robot. That's good, but now I'm curious as to why he would uphold the stay of execution. The defendant's case is extremely weak; Taylor pled guilty and admitted he was on crack. It doesn't matter to me that he's black and his victim was white, he committed two separate heinous crimes on a young girl who thought she was going to school that day.

If there's ever a case to pull the switch, this is it.

UPDATES:

CNN's Netscape News linked to this post as its featured blog. I am honored to receive the attention and welcome any new readership that may result from the exposure.

Malkin sticks it to Ted Kennedy, the Senator who embarrassed himself along with many other Democrats these past few weeks.