That's my best guess for why he shows a little bit of humanity from time to time. I hope, REALLY HOPE, that means he won't be in the bag for Trump when the time comes.

I think he truly believes in this vote. Otherwise he could certainly have voted with the conservatives and nobody would have thought twice about it.

I just can't agree it isn't a major case. Any time the court takes away the ability for the state to execute someone it's a big deal. In this case, they didn't preclude this specific person from being executed. They only opened the door for the lower court to find him too incompetent.

But, the bottom line is, they added another reason why a person cannot be executed and sent the case back to the lower court to see if this person meets the criteria. Roberts actually did follow the logic of earlier opinions on this sort of thing so he has the argument he followed prior rulings and precedent on his side.

Bloodlust is never truly sated, it is just pacified for a little while.

Which is why the law should be better than that.

http://www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/Biblequestions/eyeforeye.htm

1. History of the legislation. The lex talionis is found in three passages in the
Old Testament (Ex. 21:23, 24; Lev. 24:19, 20; and Deut. 19:21). A similar law is found in
the ancient Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi. Earlier codes legislated financial
compensation for bodily injuries, but Hammurabi seems to have been the first to require
physical injury for physical injury. This has led some historians to conclude that there
was a time when monetary compensation redressed personal injuries because the state did
not consider them to be crimes against society.
The law of equivalency was a significant development in the history of
jurisprudence in the sense that what used to be a private matter between two families was
now taken over by the state and considered to be criminal behavior. This fits very well
with the Old Testament understanding of offenses against others as offenses against the
covenant community and against the God of the covenant.
2. The principle involved. The law of equivalency was an attempt to limit the
extent of a punishment and to discourage cruelty. The principle of this legislation is
one of equivalency; that is to say, the punishment should correspond to the crime and
should be limited to the one involved in the injury (Deut. 19:18-21).
This law was a rejection of family feuds and the spirit of revenge that led the
injured party to uncontrolled attacks against the culprit and the members of his or her
family (cf. Gen. 4:23). The punishment was required to fit the crime, a principle still
used in modern jurisprudence. I must add that in the Bible this law was applied equally
to all members of society (Lev. 24:22), while in Mesopotamia it was limited to crimes
against society's "important" people.

I had thought that the purpose of the death penalty was to rid the world of a murderer and to deter others from commiting a similar crime.

Now it appears that the condemned man is supposed to derive some lesson from the experience, presumably a lesson he can put to use ... when he's dead and buried by the end of the day.

It would appear that the man was not demented when he committed the murder, else that impairment would have made for a successful defense. It's not established that he's not being tormented by the symptoms of his dementia, so the absence of euthanasia is not necessarily more humane. Even demented, he might still be a danger to others so, yes, there's still a reason to put him down.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad decision?

According to Michael Clemente, the Framers had a very broad definition of insanity, than the Court has used over time.
Guess who is a clerk for Roberts right now?

Oh, and it may have helped that Roberts got the Assistant Attorney General for Alabama to concede that Madison’s dementia may shield him from execution under Panetti, even though he isn’t delusional.

Michael Clemente Yale Law Journal
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/a-reassessment-of-common-law-protections-for-idiots