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Kennedy And The Tail Of Minos, Richard Broughton

Richard Broughton

In Dante’s Inferno, the damned appeared before Minos, who judged the gravity of their sins and assigned their souls to their respective circles of Hell by wrapping his tail around his body. In this paper, I examine whether, in light of its decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana and its methodology for reviewing categorical exemptions from the death penalty, the Supreme Court has problematically assumed for itself the role of a kind of contemporary constitutional Minos, at least in the realm of capital punishment. First, I argue, Kennedy is a case about comparative resulting harms among violent crimes. The Kennedy dissent …