Hopefully very soon - it's wasteful, inhumane violation of the 8th amendment, and expensive. We need an immediate federal moratorium and eventual abolition.
I've written about this before, but the Supreme Court's misapplication of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" is the clearest example of judicial overreach that is currently going on. (Only the Lochner era treatment of the Fourteenth Amendment is comparably bad.) The prohibition was intended as a limit on the judicial and the executive branches, not the legislative branch. In my opinion, the only valid reason for the court to strike down a punishment under the eighth would be if the prosecution had sought and obtained a punishment that was on the books, but hadn't been used in a long while. That still leaves Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment reasons to strike down particular cases or implementations of capital punishment.
My take is that the 8th is one instance where the Constitution is a "living document," in that what constitutes cruel and unusual is subject to change as societal morays change. So when most states have banned it, that would constitute a good inditia that it has indeed become cruel and unusual.
