Ted Poe: “soon our United States Supreme Court will hear the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana and decide whether capital punishment is…”

“soon our United States Supreme Court will hear the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana and decide whether capital punishment is permitted in rape cases where the victim is a child that is 12 or under. Patrick Kennedy was sentenced in Louisiana to death after a jury convicted him of raping his own 8-year-old daughter. The facts show that he even tried to cover up the rape by cleaning up the evidence and then he blamed the rape on two neighborhood boys. New Louisiana law allows the death sentence for raping a child that is under the age of 12, so Kennedy v. Louisiana asks the Supreme Court, among other things, to decide whether the eighth amendment of the United States Constitution, the cruel and unusual punishment clause, permits a State to punish the crime of rape of a child under the death penalty. In 1977, the Supreme Court decided that a death sentence for rape of an adult woman was unconstitutional under a case called Coker v. Georgia. Coker really didn't discuss child rape, even though the victim in that case was 16 years of age. But since the Coker decision, State courts have interpreted it to limit death penalty crimes to certain murders. Those murders are what I call the murder-plus doctrine.…”