It’s been over 2 months since he officially took power, and The Seminal details some progress…

Raul Castro announced today that he is commuting all death sentences in Cuba (with the exception of 3 individuals charged with terrorism) to lesser sentences, citing humanitarian reasons. Cuba has faced pressure from human-rights activists to abolish its death penalty, which is still administered via firing squad.

The commutations are the latest in a wave of populist reforms introduced by Raul Castro since his older brother Fidel Castro retired and handed him power. Over the weekend he announced he’s raising pensions for retirees as well as salaries for some government employees, while earlier this month he lifted long-time bans on Cubans owning cell phones and staying in hotels reserved for foreigners.

Oh, and he’s also allowed Cubans to own personal computers, and that’s given rise to uncensored blogging about the country.

And yes, Raul still has a long way to go to undo the harm his brother has wrought on the country, and one can’t help but think the lion’s share of it will only happen after Fidel is dead, but these steps do amount to some progress and it should at least be recognized.

The ruling ended up 7-2 which is pretty decisive for the current court when dealing with politically charged issues. The basic principle the court has established is that a death penalty method must create a “substantial risk” of pain before it is considered “cruel and unusual punishment.” The lethal injection method, the court decided, does not create that substantial risk. While the court only considered Kentucky’s system, it’s highly unlikely that similar cases from other states will turn out any differently.

The ruling means executions will now resume.

While death penalty opponents had hoped this case would end up limiting the death penalty in America, it was never about the legality of the death penalty itself. Even the two dissenters, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, did not call into question the fundamental constitutionality of the death penalty. Baze v. Rees was a procedural issue, asking the court to rule whether or not a specific method of execution inflicted pain that was cruel and unusual. The 7-2 ruling indicates the proponents of the method did a convincing job in proving the injections are an acceptably low-pain execution procedure.

Interestingly, John Paul Stevens, while siding with the majority, wrote a separate opinion calling for an end to the death penalty. In a surprising bit of judicial restraint, Stevens wrote that precedent obligated him to uphold the lethal injection method but that he believes the death penalty represents “pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.”

Given that Stevens sided with the majority and is quite old, death penalty opponents now have little hope of advancing their agenda through the courts. If they want to end the death penalty, they will have to change public opinion which will in turn change public policy. For whatever reasons, we are a nation which likes having the option of inflicting the ultimate punishment. Changing that attitude could take many, many years. Death penalty opponents are in for a long, hard slog.

I am very anti-death penalty because any system that puts innocent people to death is simply broken and unethical.

However…if states feel they absolutely must have it, I think lethal injection is the most humane way to kill people…and the highest court in the land overwhelmingly agrees.

From NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky’s method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, not only clearing the way for Kentucky to resume executions but ending an unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that have the death penalty.

However, Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring reluctantly with the judgment of the court, wrote that he now believed capital punishment itself is unconstitutional, and that Wednesday’s ruling might serve to reignite the debate over whether it should exist in the United States.

By 7 to 2, the court rejected challenges to the Kentucky execution procedure brought by two death-row inmates, holding that they had failed to show that the risks of pain from mistakes in an otherwise “humane lethal execution protocol” amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Constitution.

The important distinction here is the idea that it’s cruel and unusual, not that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.

SCOTUSblog and WSJ’s Law Blog have more.