Effective reflections on Baze and Kennedy

Though the Supreme Court has a relatively light death penalty docket this term (which I consider a cause for celebration), the two big cases are doozies.  The Baze lethal injection case and the Kennedy child rape case could both produce very important rulings, and this new piece from The Weekly Standard highlights their import.  Here are excerpts:

This Supreme Court term marks a crossroads for death penalty jurisprudence.  For the first time since 1890, the Court is considering the constitutionality of a particular means of execution — the lethal injection cocktail currently used by most states. And it is expected to rule, in a second case, on the constitutionality of capital punishment for a crime other than murder — the rape of a child....

[T]his term's death penalty cases — Baze v. Rees, argued in January, and Kennedy v. Louisiana, due to be heard in April — could yield a deeper entrenchment of foreign mores as constitutional arbiters of punishment under our laws.  Either way, the Court could dramatically redefine the Eighth Amendment limitations on both the scope and nature of the death penalty.