Is the "culture of death" slowly dying at the Supreme Court?

As regular readers know, I have long complained about Supreme Court being caught up in what I called a “culture of death”: a tendency of the Court to devote, in my view, far too much of its scarce judicial time and energy to reviewing death penalty cases and adjudicating the claims of death row defendants.  I synthesized these complaints in an article published last year in Ohio Northern University Law Review based (on a lecture I gave at ONU) titled, "A Capital Waste of Time? Examining the Supreme Court's 'Culture of Death'," which is available at this link. In a coda to that piece, I noted that the Court had recently reduced the number of capital case cert grants, and I speculated that recent changes in personnel might be moving the Court away from its troublesome affinity for obsessing over capital cases.

I return to these issues upon noticing recent posts here and here at Crime & Consequences, in which Kent notes how many capital cases were before the Justices at their "long conference" and in which he subsequently notes that the Court did not have a single capital case in its long list of cert grants today.  More broadly, as detailed in the links on this DPIC page, the Supreme Court had a very light capital docket in the October 2008 Term and this Term so far is also shaping up to be free of any truly significant capital punishment cases (especially after the Court's Troy Davis dodge).

Though it is likely still too early to assert that the Court is  actively moving away from its previous obsession with capital cases, I am inclined to spotlight (and praise) the real possibility that Justices are coming to see that regular and repeated review of capital cases on the merits may do significantly more harm than good.