Unusual Punishment

WASHINGTON - With dissenting justices calling for "an end to this shameful practice," a deeply divided Supreme Court refused yesterday to decide whether executing juvenile killers violates the Constitution. In a one-sentence order, the court turned away arguments by Kentucky inmate Kevin Nigel Stanford that it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, to execute him for a murder he committed at 17. But the issue revealed deep divisions on the court, as four justices, led by Justice John Paul Stevens, said Stanford and others younger than 18 when they kill should not be put to death.

Amid reports that inmates and employees are becoming ill from the intense heat inside the Women's Detention Center, Baltimore's public defender's office began filing motions this week asking judges to release some of its female clients. During bail hearings, public defenders have argued that their clients are being subjected to "cruel and unusual punishment" in a facility without air conditioning. District Judge Charlotte M. Cooksey has scheduled a hearing today to discuss the issue. "It's so hot it takes your breath away.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court returned yesterday to the issue of whether killers who are mentally retarded should face the death penalty, weighing whether its decision to uphold such executions 13 years ago should be reversed because of changing public opinion on capital punishment. The question before the court is whether executing a convicted murderer who is mentally retarded violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The court is reviewing the case of a Virginia man, Daryl R. Atkins, who has an IQ of 59 but was found competent to stand trial.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to reconsider its 1989 ruling that the Constitution permits the execution of mentally retarded murderers, setting up what is likely to be the court's most important ruling on the death penalty in more than a decade. The court said it would hear the appeal of Ernest Paul McCarver, a North Carolina inmate who was sentenced to death for murdering a cafeteria worker in 1987. McCarver has an intelligence quotient of 67, and his attorneys argue that executing him would amount to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

NOTHING WAS usual about the punishment inflicted on Charlie Squad members. The treatment was so cruel that it demands immediate explanations from Gov. Parris N. Glendening and the entire chain of command.Fourteen Charlie Squad members, subjects of a four-part Sun series, are juvenile offenders who were sent to the Savage Leadership Challenge in Garrett County for rehabilitation.Reporter Todd Richissin and photographer Andre F. Chung vividly documented assaults by leather-gloved guards -- fists to the throat, punches to the mouth, mashing faces into the ground -- at the Western Maryland boot camp.

Saying the punishment is too severe for a woman nearly in ruin, attorneys for former Baltimore Comptroller Jacqueline F. McLean have asked a judge to effectively void her conviction in a corruption scandal last year so that she may keep her $23,850 annual pension.The motion -- which is being hotly protested by the state special prosecutor -- asks that Mrs. McLean's sentence for theft and misconduct be modified to "probation before judgment," which would strike the convictions from her record.

Washington. -- There will be lots of recriminations, racial theories and general outbursts of exasperation with our jury system when the O.J. Simpson jury fails to convict or exonerate O.J. Simpson in the murders of his former wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman.I say ''when'' because this most celebrated of court cases will surely end in a mistrial by reason of jury depletion.And even if by some miracle of human endurance it goes to jury deliberation, I am convinced that there will be a hung jury.

Washington. -- Vague, overbroad, cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws and a violation of the constitutional right to travel.Those, according to the lawyers for several of the more litigious homeless persons in Santa Ana, California, were the defects of that city's ordinance that makes it ''unlawful for any person to camp, occupy camp facilities or use camp paraphernalia'' in any street, public parking lot or public area such as parks, or to ''store personal property, including camp facilities and camp paraphernalia'' in such areas.

She was about 12 years old and a student at Dundalk Middle School. I had come to talk to her class."What do you think should happen to Susan Smith?" she asked.For a moment, I couldn't place the name."The woman who drown-ded her children," the girl said.Oh, right, yeah, I said. Well, what do you think should happen to her?"I think they should put her in a car and push it in the water and drown her!" she said.Her classmates gave their vocal support.Our society would never do such a thing, of course.

CruelArthur W. Machen's article (Opinion * Commentary, Aug. 9) essentially is a plea for abolition of the death penalty, citing John Grisham's novel "The Chamber" as one of his authorities. He also regards "cruel and unusual punishment" in keeping convicted murderers on death row.The cruel and unusual punishment suffered by the victim's survivors, such as parents of a murdered child, is not protected by our Constitution. Murder victims are bodies under ground for families and friends to mourn, gone out of sight, almost irrelevant.