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A LETHAL DECISION? Amid a grueling presidential primary season and an especially brutal week in Iraq, the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees was a one-day news blip. Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol has been found legal; executions around the country may resume. No presidential campaign issued a statement; no reporter asked the candidates for their views on whether a medical cocktail banished by veterinarians as too cruel for animal euthanasia is suitable for killing humans.

Yet there was real importance in Baze. Start with Justice John Paul Stevens, who in 1976 was part of the seven-vote majority who restored capital punishment. Stevens took the occasion of Baze to declare that thirty-two years ago he was wrong: the death penalty is, in fact, "patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment." At age 88, Stevens has joined two of his colleagues from 1976 in a twilight conversion: Harry Blackmun, who renounced "the machinery of death" in one of his last rulings, and Lewis Powell, who came to the same conclusion after he retired. Why it took them so long is a matter for biographers, but the curious historical fact is that--with Stevens's change of heart--if the 1976 Supreme Court were resurrected and asked to vote again, the death penalty would lose, 5-4.

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