Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a bill last Wednesday making the sexual abuse of a child under the age of 12 a capital offense.
With a stroke of the pen, Idaho joins Florida and Tennessee, which expanded their death penalty statutes to include sexual abuse of a child in 2023 and 2024, respectively, as the third state to bet on the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008).
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state was the first to make child rape a capital offense in 2023, in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, said at the time that he thinks the current conservative U.S. Supreme Court will vote to overturn Kennedy. That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments” which ban cruel and unusual punishment.
Kennedy “was wrong,” DeSantis stated. “We do not believe the Supreme Court in its current iteration would uphold it.” Three of the four dissenters in Kennedy, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas, are still on the Court and have been joined by conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
Other states considering similar bills include South Dakota and Missouri.
Gov. Little also signed a bill that will make shooting a person to death its primary method of execution just one week after South Carolina killed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, inflicting what his lawyer told CNN was a “horrifying and violent death.”
Five states, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, South Carolina, and Idaho, have firing squads on the books as an execution method. Still, Idaho is the first to make shooting people to death its primary method, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Idaho Capital Sun reported that, according to one of the bill’s sponsors, the shooting would be “mechanized,” which calls for “a remote-operated weapons system alongside traditional firing squad methods.”
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