Supreme Court rejects constitutional challenge to death penalty

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to hear an appeal asserting that the death penalty violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment filed by a Louisiana man convicted of fatally shooting his pregnant former girlfriend.

Two of the eight justices, liberals Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said they would have accepted the case, repeating concerns about the death penalty's constitutionality they raised in a different case last year.

The justices, who have sharply disagreed among themselves over capital punishment, declined to consider the appeal brought by Lamondre Tucker, who was sentenced to death for the 2008 murder of 18-year-old Tavia Sills in Shreveport. Sills, nearly five months pregnant, was shot three times and her body was dumped in a pond.

Tucker, who is black, had argued in part that black males had an increased likelihood of being convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Louisiana's Caddo Parish due to endemic racism.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-deathpenalty-idUSKCN0YM220

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Politics | Tue May 31, 2016 1:04pm EDT
WASHINGTON | BY LAWRENCE HURLEY

[metroins]

1. I hate the death penalty

But this would've been the wrong case to hear. He would've lost.