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Any predictions on how a Justice Sotomayor would approach capital cases?

By Douglas A. Berman

This new AP piece, headlind "Death cases among early issues for new justice," spotlights that SCOTUS nominee Judge Sotomayor, though lacking a judicial record with the death penalty, has encountered the issue in at least one other setting.  Here is how this AP piece gets started: As a director of a Puerto Rican advocacy group in the 1980s, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was part of a three-person committee that equated capital punishment with racism. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund argued in a 1981 letter to the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, that "capital punishment represents ongoing racism within our society." Sotomayor later became a federal judge and spent 16 years on the bench without having to address the death penalty, one of the most contentious legal issues in the United States...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on May 30, 2009 (boomark / email).