Noah Feldman, Columnist

Here's How Far Some Justices Go to Defend the Death Penalty

Supreme Court conservatives would use an easy capital case to make bad law.

June 10, 2016 at 3:15 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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A judge shouldn't be allowed to vote in a case involving a capital sentence when he was formerly the prosecutor who sought the death penalty in the same case. That sounds obvious, and the Supreme Court said so on Thursday.

But three justices dissented, suggesting that the answer might not have been obvious after all. The dissents show how deeply divided the court really is over the death penalty – and how far the conservative justices are prepared to go in its defense.