Your average murder will only kill once or twice. Your average rapist is a lifetime offender. If you put a murderer to death, you do it for vengeance/justice. If you put a child rapist to death, you not only punish someone who has destroyed a life, but you save many people from the fate of becoming the offenders future victims.

It is never ok for the courts to ban something on the grounds that "they know better than us", and/or "hard decisions belong in their hands, not ours". They are representatives of the peoples justice. Cutting the people out of the decision making loop, for any reason, is wrong. Even if you reason is "but making decisions is so darned hard on the people". The reasons matter as much as the results.

Actually they represent the constitution. Our legislature and our executive are meant to represent us. The supreme court was put in place to evaluate the constitutionalilty of the various policies and practices enacted by those representatives.

To be honest, I'm not sure where I come down on the whole child rape as a capitol crime but I do agree that removing rapists from society permanently (even by incarceration) is the only reasonable sentence.

Fair enough. But if they are meant to represent the constitution, then their rulings must be based in it. Stating that a punishment is cruel and unusual, by citing the difficulties potentially placed on witness's who may testify in those trials, is straying from the point. They are meant then to assess the crime, the punishment, and whether or not it is cruel and unusual towards the convicted/guilty party. Burdens upon those who would testify are irrelevant, and they fail the victim by trying to protect them. They were not called upon to restrict the rights of the witness, but instead to evaluate the constitutional relevance of the punishment.

And I agree. Though I strongly dislike the Death Penalty and hope that it will one day be obsolete, rapists and child molesters need to be far, far removed from potential victims; either through isolation, execution, or perhaps through a third, as yet unknown method.