Today in the Machinery of Death

The Supreme Court’s formal prohibition on executing the severely mentally handicapped or ill is becoming a nullity because of their extreme deference to state court judgments. The holdings no longer have much substantive effect; they’re more a way of pretending the death penalty system is capable of singling out the most heinous and culpable offenders for execution when in fact all it’s capable of doing is arbitrarily choosing some people guilty (and sometimes not guilty) of similar or lesser offenses as people who aren’t executed for unique punishment. That the death penalty is still constitutional for “felony murder” (i.e. for people who aren’t meaningfully culpable of murder at all) draws a line under that.

…see also. The single biggest variable determining whether you’ll get the death penalty is your quality of counsel.