The Supreme Court Analysis

1. I think some of the work of the Supreme Court is constrained by institutional roles and procedures but the vast majority of work done by the Supreme Court is autonomous. One of the first examples of constraint by an institutional role and longstanding tradition in the book “A Wild Justice” is “In the early 1960s, the notion that executions were cruel and unusual punishment seemed fanciful. When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, the death penalty was mandatory for most felonies and used in every state. The Fifth Amendment referenced capital crimes explicitly and implicitly when it said no person should be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in the aftermath of
Nothing should have suggested to Justice Arthur Goldberg that the idea of using the Constitution to strike down the death penalty could succeed.” (Pg. 5) This is definitely an institutionalized and traditional way of thinking.

I think Justice Goldberg demonstrated a considerable amount of autonomous work because he “fomented an intellectual revolution: a radical transformation of the view of the Court’s proper role that had profound consequences for capital punishment and American civil liberties.”(Pg. 5) Justice Goldberg was very consequential and powerful when he was a Justice on the Supreme Court and it seemed like he tried to move away from traditional viewpoints. He formed his own opinions on capital punishment that were completely separate from how the court ruled in the past. Additionally, Goldberg abhorred the death penalty since he was a child and he continuously thought about overturning the death penalty. He also drew a direct link between the Holocaust and capital punishment. Goldberg had no confidence in the ability of politics to produce justice. (Pg. 8) He thought about capital punishment much differently than the other justices and
On the issue of the death penalty, though, Frankfurter and Black found common ground. The framers hadn’t intended to ban capital punishment. Frankfurter regarded the death penalty as a complex moral question best left to the states. The Court didn’t address whether a state could properly take life. During the first 175 years of existence, the Court discussed the cruel and unusual punishment clause only ten times, the death penalty merely six. (Pg. 15)
Another example of the Court being autonomous and moving away from institutional roles and procedures is when Goldberg proposed to measure the constitutionality of capital punishment not by the language or intent of the Founding Fathers but rather by the conditions and needs of modern society. (Pg. 23) Overall, the Supreme Court was an institution of deep, long-standing traditions and customs. (Pg. 24) However, some of the work of the Supreme Court is