After a decade of relative quiet, the Supreme Court has in the last several years fundamentally reshaped the nation's capital justice system.
It has narrowed the class of people eligible for execution, excluding juvenile offenders yesterday as it had previously the mentally retarded. It has rebuked lower courts for sending people to their deaths without adequate safeguards. And it has paid increasing attention to the international opposition to capital punishment.
"Early in the 1990's, we reached the high point in deregulating death," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, alluding to decisions in which the court refused to hear defendants' claims of innocence because they were raised too late. "Then there was very little from the Supreme Court through the 1990's. Now, in a whole series of substantive and procedural decisions, you have a re-regulation taking place.