Jimmy Carter: Ban the Death Penalty

US Supreme Court should rule death penalty is 'cruel and unusual punishment,' said former president

 The death penalty is a form of legalized "cruel and unusual punishment" and should be banned across the entirety of the U.S., former president Jimmy Carter urged in a Guardian interview published on Monday.

"It’s time for the Supreme Court to look at the totality of the death penalty once again,” said Carter. “My preference would be for the court to rule that it is cruel and unusual punishment, which would make it prohibitive under the U.S. constitution.”

Carter's sentiment is shared by an increasing number of Americans. As recent polling has shown, support for the death penalty in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest rate in more than four decades. While a majority still approves of the measure, support has fallen from 80% in 1994 to roughly 60% today.
Currently, 32 U.S. states still allow the death penalty. However, as The Guardian notes, the majority of the 1,352 executions since 1976 took place in 2% of the counties in the nation

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Call Off the Global Drug War

Atlanta

IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

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This is a New York Times op-ed by Jimmy Carter. Not sure how the link will work now that the Times is behind a partial pay wall. Tom