McCain lauds anti-Gadhafi force during Libya visit

U.S. Sen. John McCain, one of the strongest proponents in Congress of the American military interference in Libya, said Friday that Libyan insurgent’s hostility Moammar Gadhafi's troops are his heroes.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee made the comment after incoming in Benghazi, a city that has been the resistance capital in the rebel-held eastern Libya.

McCain said he was in Benghazi "to get an on the ground estimation of the situation" and planned to meet with the rebel National Transition Council, the de-facto government in the eastern half of the country, and members of the dissenter military.

"They are my heroes," McCain said of the rebels as he walked out of a local hotel in Benghazi. He was peripatetic in a toughened Mercedes jeep and had a security detail. A few Libyans waved American flags as his vehicle herd past.

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Obama, McCain break ice in Oval Office meeting

At the present, additional than two years after incompatible as campaign rivals, President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are putting their association on defrost and searching for some widespread ground.

Obama and McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, met privately for half an hour Wednesday daylight in the Oval Office, the result of outreach between the two subsequent to the Arizona shooting spree that badly wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last month.

"We talked about a wide multiplicity of issues," McCain said later. "Noticeably we talked about migration, we talk about Egypt, and we talked about fiscal issue."

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Sarah Palin on the death penalty

Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's pick for the next Dick Cheney (to borrow a phrase from Joe Biden), is "pro-life" but not opposed to capital punishment.

According to several web sites, she said in November, 2006: "If [Alaska's]legislature passed death penalty law, I would sign it."

Source: Abolish! newsgroup

Who is Sarah Palin?

In selecting Palin, McCain counters the historic nature of Barack Obama’s candidacy. She’s young — 44, three years younger than Obama — and she’s a woman, the first to land a spot on the ticket of a major political party since Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro 24 years ago.

Disheartened Clinton supporters who were thinking about crossing over to vote for McCain may now have one more reason to do so.

Voters on the right will like Palin’s conservative credentials: She’s opposed to both abortion rights and gay marriage, supports increased domestic drilling for oil, is a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association and has a son in the U.S. Army. She's not opposed to capital punishment (If the legislature passed a death penalty law, I would sign it. We have a right to know that someone who rapes and murders a child or kills an innocent person in a drive by shooting will never be able to do that again. )

Obama spokesman Bill Burton seized immediately on the experience issue, saying McCain has put "the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency."

A former high school basketball star and beauty queen, Palin has limited experience in elected office: She served for four years as a member of the Wasilla City Council and four more years as the mayor of Wasilla, and she hasn’t yet completed her second full year as governor of Alaska.

Palin herself has been the subject of a probe involving the firing of her former brother in law, a state trooper who was fighting over child custody with Palin’s sister. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan has said he felt pressure from the governor’s office to fire the trooper.

Source: politico.com

Lawmakers vow to execute child rapists

Angry politicians vowed to keep writing laws that condemn child rapists to death, despite a Supreme Court decision saying such punishment is unconstitutional.

"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this," said Alabama Attorney General Troy King, a Republican. The justices, he said, are "creating a situation where the country is a less safe place to grow up."

The court's 5-4 decision Wednesday derailed the efforts of nearly a dozen states supporting the right to kill those convicted of raping a child and said execution was confined to attacks that take a life and to other crimes including treason and espionage.

At issue before the high court was a Louisiana case involving Patrick Kennedy, sentenced to die for raping his 8-year-old daughter in her bed, an assault so severe she required surgery.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that "the death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child," despite the horrendous nature of the crime.

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called the ruling "incredibly absurd" and "a clear abuse of judicial authority" and said officials will "evaluate ways to amend our statute to maintain death as a penalty for this horrific crime."

Oklahoma officials said they, too, weren't ready to give up and would "certainly look at what options we have," state Sen. Jay Paul Gumm said. "I think the people of Oklahoma have spoken loudly that this is one of the most heinous of crimes."

Even White House hopefuls joined the fray.

Republican Sen. John McCain called the ruling "an assault on law enforcement's efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime." Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said there should be no blanket prohibition of the death penalty for the rape of children if states want to apply it in those cases.

Forty-four states prohibit the death penalty for any kind of rape, and at least four states besides Louisiana permit it for child rape: Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. There's disagreement over the status of a Georgia law permitting execution for child rape, although Kennedy said in his ruling that it was still in effect.

After the ruling, all become unconstitutional.

In Texas, Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said Wednesday that most Texans believe that the death penalty is "an appropriate form of punishment for repeat child molesters. Our top priority remains protecting our most precious resource: our children."

But the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, a nonprofit victim advocacy group representing 80 rape crisis centers, applauded the ruling.

"Most child sexual abuse victims are abused by a family member or close family friend," the group said in a statement. "The reality is that child victims and their families don't want to be responsible for sending a grandparent, cousin or longtime family friend to death row."

Nationwide, only two men have been sentenced to death for sexually abusing children, both in Louisiana. The second case involves a man convicted of repeatedly raping a 5-year-old girl. Both men will get new sentences.

Several states, including Missouri, Alabama and Colorado, had been considering similar laws.

In South Carolina, Republican Attorney General Henry McMaster said states could fight Wednesday's ruling by waiting for a change in the makeup of the Supreme Court or by getting legislatures to redo death penalty laws.

Legal experts were divided on the potential success of such tactics.

According to Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, the justices' ruling appears ironclad.

"In the absence of death, the death penalty is off the table," he said. The court, he said, "could have left open the possibility of revamping child rape laws, by age for example, but it did not."

Law professor Deborah Denno of Fordham University wasn't so sure. It could be possible to argue for the application of the death penalty against attackers who "intended to kill" their victims but didn't, she said. Or those who assault especially young children, such as toddlers

Source: AP

Jindal vows to secure death sentence for child rape

Washington, June 26 (IANS) Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal has said he will seek to enact laws that would invalidate a US Supreme Court ruling which struck down the death penalty for raping a child. “One thing is clear,” said Republican Jindal, “the five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same standards of decency as the people of Louisiana.”

In a 5-4 decision Wednesday, the top US court ruled as unconstitutional a Louisiana law that permits the death penalty for people convicted of raping children younger than 12. Louisiana had the only two inmates in the country facing death for raping a child.

Besides Jindal, the first Indian American chief executive of a US state, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have also opposed the ruling.

McCain said it was “profoundly disturbing” that “there is a judge anywhere in America, who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of most serious of punishments.”

Disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision, Obama said the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes but “states have the right to consider for capital punishment.”

“I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution.”

Legal analysts said Jindal’s pledge to keep the death penalty by amending state law may be designed to win him political credit but stands little chance of becoming reality.

“I don’t know how they’re going to do that,” Ira C. Lupu, George Washington University Law School professor of constitutional law, was quoted as saying by the Washington Times.

“The state doesn’t have the authority to override the Supreme Court decisions that are based on interpretations of the federal Constitution. As long as this ruling today doesn’t get overturned, they’ll never be able to execute someone for anything other than murder.”

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Louisiana’s law violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The Eighth Amendment “requires that resort to capital punishment be restrained, limited in its instances of application and reserved for the worst of crimes, those that, in the case of crimes against individuals, take the victim’s life,” wrote Justice Kennedy.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that child-rape death penalty laws should be allowed if they reflect society’s “evolving” standards of decency.

“The harm that is caused to the victims and to society at large by the worst child rapists is grave. … It is the judgment of the Louisiana lawmakers and those in an increasing number of other states that these harms justify the death penalty,” wrote Justice Alito, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The Louisiana law at issue in Kennedy v. Louisiana authorised the death penalty for Patrick Kennedy, who was convicted of raping his eight-year-old stepdaughter.

Attorneys for the state of Louisiana argued that the death penalty is a deterrent to sexual assaults on children. Since 1993, five other states - Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas - have enacted laws allowing the death penalty for raping a child.

Source: thatindian.com