Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, almost 200 years later, civil rights activists were trying to make the case that the way the death penalty was applied was unusual. And they started gathering data.
Attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that black men were overwhelmingly sentenced to death when compared to white men convicted of the same crimes.
Another one was that the death penalty could seem really arbitrary and it varied from state to state.
It was quiet until the end of the Supreme Court's term in June.
That meant all executions had to stop until states changed their laws.
And it's not that the punishment itself is intrinsically wrong. It's the way that that punishment is being applied, the lack of standardization for when it is applied that makes it something that's just untenable to still allow in the country.
We still have the death penalty in America, though. What the hell happened?
If you could sum up some of the basic reasons for why states and also the federal government quickly pushed back against this, what were their justifications?
So 35 states and the federal government write new laws. Death rows around the country start to fill up again.
In 1976, just four years later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments for new death penalty laws from five states.
But the Supreme Court strikes down the laws in North Carolina and Louisiana because those statutes, the court said, proposed mandatory death sentences for certain crimes.
So the court ruled that in order to sentence people to death, juries had to hear, quote, mitigating evidence, evidence that might make them reconsider execution, like whether the convicted had a history of abuse, mental health issues, or even remorse. Without that step, the court said, the death penalty is unconstitutional.
That is a beautiful phrase. The diverse frailties of humankind.
So it allows it, but with limitations.
But since 1958, the Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of who can be sentenced to death. So people with intellectual disabilities or who were juveniles at the time of the crime or people who have raped but not murdered, the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot be executed.
Cesare Beccaria, the Italian philosopher who inspired much of the American founder's thinking around cruel and unusual punishment, himself quoted another famous philosopher, the French Montesquieu. He wrote that any punishment that goes beyond necessity is tyrannical.
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
And me. And. Laurence Wu.
Thank you to Johannes Derdy, Tony Cavett, Nadia Lansing, Keandre Starling, Jonette Oaks, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at ThruLine at NPR.org.
Showing 121–140 of 199 · page 7 of 10
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