New York Times March 27, 2001 Supreme Court to Review Issue of Executing Retarded Killers By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, March 26 — The Supreme Court announced today that it would decide whether a growing national consensus against the execution of mentally retarded murderers meant that such executions should be deemed unconstitutional as "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The case, to be argued next fall, could produce the court's most important ruling on the death penalty in years. [clip]
In the April issue of Chicago magazine there's an article by Steve Rhodes on Ann Marie Lipinski, the new editor of the Chicago Tribune. She's the first women to edit the Tribune in its 154-year history, and one of just eight women editing any of the top 50 U.S. newspapers. The Trib is owned by the Tribune Company empire which has recently acquired the Times-Mirror corporation. The Tribune is now the company's second-largest newspaper, behind the Los Angeles Times.
The piece mentions David Halberstam's September piece in Brill's magazine in which he says the Tribune "gives off the feeling of an ownership whose passion is for its stock, not its readership nor the news it is reporting." Rhodes quotes Halberstam as saying that the corporate executives who run a paper like the Tribune, "find an editor who fits their value system, someone who is popular and well liked, and they make it very, very profitable." In 1989, the Tribune Company's profit margin was 17 percent; in 1999 it hit 23.9 percent. (In 2000, the company's margin slipped to 21 percent, probably due to its acquisition of the less profitable Times-Mirror Company.) Rhodes writes, "Tribune newspapers have an even higher margin --29.2 percent in 1999---than its media empire overall. The company's annual report does not break out the Chicago Tribune's financials."
In response to Halberstam's charges that the Trib is a passionless, profit vehicle, managing editor James O'Shea protested in a letter to Brill's. Rhodes writes, "O'Shea pointed to the paper's many projects, including its nationally recognized examination of the death penalty, as clear examples of the paper's journalistic excellence. In the same letters column, Halberstam stood by his arguments."
When the Renquist court and the profit vehicle Trib question the death penalty, can it still really be considered a radical cause? I don't see either institution as fundamentally challenging the neoliberal, capitalist order.
Peter