Nebraska Supreme Court Plays Cruel Trick on WMC

As Wisconsin faces another Supreme Court race this spring, the Nebraska Supreme Court dealt a jolting blow to the credibility of the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) and their so called judicial activism campaign.

WMC which is marketing Supreme Court Unbound in an effort to defeat sitting Justice Louis Butler, continues to advance the phony judicial activism message.

Here are the electrifying details.

The heart of the argument rests on the premise that activist judges do nasty things like allow plaintiffs to bring tort actions against manufacturers, or are too lenient on criminal defendants. These right wingers rely on disgraced reports from The Institute for Legal Reform.

These reports consider Nebraska a model Supreme Court. The Institute  ranked it the 2nd, 2nd, and 3rd in each of the last three years.

So far so good.

Then last week the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment.

Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes," Judge William Connolly wrote in the 6-1 opinion...the high court said electrocution "has proven itself to be a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein" than a state prison.

Needing a chair to stand on in undermining the court, the spokesperson for Governor Dave Heineman issued the following statement:

I am appalled by the Nebraska Supreme Court's decision," Heineman said in a statement. "Once again, this activist court has ignored its own precedent and the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court to continue its assault on the Nebraska death penalty." (emphasis added)

Like Communists in bygone eras, now there are activist justices under every rock and bed, and every conservative state supreme court.

For more on this subject: Wisconsin's Outstanding Judiciary: Documented and Judicial Activism: The Phrase You Will Hear For The Next Seventy Days.

Comments

[iT]

The Governor is appalled at the cessation of cruelty. That's good stuff!

It reminds me of something I posted at my blog the other day, what a friend quipped after shelling out fifty 1980 dollars to watch the second mayhem-free encounter between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran: "The lack of violence was sickening."