Capital punishment in theory and practice

A number of interesting death penalty items around the blogshpere merit a quick spotlight:

• Dan Markel at PrawfsBlawg shares an extended and quite thoughtful set of reactions to the paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule entitled  "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs" in this post.  I previously commented and collected others' comments here, and the Sunstein and Vermeulepaper is linked in this post.

• Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast reports in this post on the stalled status of a Texas bill which could have allowed the state to "opt-in" to the truncated federal habeas process created by AEDPA.  The post is an interesting reminder that, a decade after AEDPA's passage, no state has taken the steps needed to qaulify as a opt-in state under AEDPA.

• The PRACDL Blog has two notable capital sentencing posts: this post details the results of "the first capital case to be tried to a penalty phase in Puerto Rico's recent history with the federal death penalty" (two life sentences); this post notes a forthcoming capital punishment conference.