Blog Post Spots Supreme Court Ruling Mistake in Child Rape Case

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment is not constitutional for rape of a child in the case Kennedy v. Louisiana. A large part of the argument in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion was based on jurisdiction. The majority noted that a child rapist could face the ultimate penalty in only six states — not in any of the 30 other states that have the death penalty, and not under the jurisdiction of the federal government either. However, over the weekend, Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals pointed out in his blog post (The Supremes Dis the Military Justice System) that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.