One day before the greatly anticipated Heller case was decided, the Supreme Court reversed a little known Louisiana law providing convicted child rapists the luxury of a quick and pacified death: an extravagance that the child victims aren't so well afforded. The petitioner to the Supreme Court, Patrick Kennedy 43, was convicted in 2003 of so violently raping his 8 year-old stepdaughter that the little girl suffered massive internal injuries and had undergone emergency surgeries to save her fragile young life. A laceration to the left wall of her vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into the vaginal structure. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette to the anus. An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that the injuries sustained by this little girl were the most severe he had seen from a sexual assault [not resulting in death] in his four years of practice. A jury of Kennedy's peers sentenced him to death for his crimes; a legal punishment by a 1995 Louisiana statute allowing death of convicted rapists of children 12 and younger.

Citing Coker (the 1977 decision from a very liberal Supreme Court) on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, Kennedy's representation claimed that the Eighth Amendment barred capitol punishment for the offense of rape. The argument is that this little girl survived her barbarous and savage rape and therefor abdicates the sentence of death for the rapist.

While serving a prison sentence for rape and murder of a 16 year old girl and a slew of other crimes, Ehrlick Anthony Coker escaped from Wade Correctional Institute in Georgia, to gratify himself in yet another brutal rape and kidnap of another 16 year old female victim. He was apprehended with the girl in his car before the opportunity to kill her was presented. Despite the corpse, the kidnaped, the battered and assaulted, and the three violently raped girls all in Coker’s aftermath, the Supreme Court ruled that death for Coker is “grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment for the crime of rape and therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment.” Patrick Kennedy as well is granted like asylum, along with over 19 million other sexual predators of children. 53% of these now constitutionally protected child rapists will have subsequent arrests while released on probation or parole. For every three million children molested and or raped, experts estimate another 6 million more are left unreported. The only reasonable conclusion left to be drawn is that Justices Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter, Stevens, and Breyer (the five justices rendering the opinion of the Court) empathize more with the criminal or are criminals themselves. There is no Justice left when the most innocent and vulnerable of society must die in order to serve it. I urge all opponents of the death penalty to adopt a felon, preferably a child rapist, and start assuming fiscal and societal responsibility for the sadistic inadequate cowards they so passionately advocate for.