Justice Alito jumps into the pool

Tony Mauro reports in this article that "Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr., like his predecessor Sandra Day O'Connor, has joined the justices' so-called "cert pool" ­-- leaving John Paul Stevens once again as the only justice not participating in the controversial case-pooling arrangement."  As I have suggested in a series of prior posts (assembled below), I fear that the undue SCOTUS emphasis on capital cases could be a by-product of clerk interest and the operation of the cert pool. 

Some related prior posts:

• Roberts, the cert pool, and sentencing jurisprudence
• The Chief goes swimming
• Pondering a (cert.) pool with much splashing about
• Cert. pool filling up with Blakely cases

UPDATE: Orin Kerr and his commentors add some additional thoughts on this important (and under-explored) topic here.