Four of the five Catholic Supreme Court Justices banded together again to endorse state-sponsored killing in cases of sexual assault on children. As heinous as such an act is, implementation of the death penalty was found by the five-judge majority to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The essentially vindictive nature of the death penalty has led Catholic bishops worldwide to condemn use of the death penalty in any circumstances.
But Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas have chosen once again to side with the punishmentalists, having voted only weeks earlier to allow reinstatement of lethal injection nationwide. Coupled with their support for indefinite detention of foreigners, this quartet of conservative justices seem bound by a peculiar dissenting form of Catholicism.