Why Not

Just below, I asked why we don't simply move death penalty cases out of the Supreme Court to a specialized criminal court. One possible reason now occurs to me. It occurs to me that those who hope for the elimination of the death penalty might oppose my move, because they are hoping that members of the Supreme Court will grow so tired with the conflicting demands of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, that they will eventually, like Justice Blackmun, attempt to simply shut down the machinery of death. It seems rather unlikely that a death penalty court will ever declare the death penalty categorically unconstitutional, since it would put them out of a job.
Now I don't know if that political calculation is actually right, and I don't know if anybody would find it persuasive, but it does seem like one group of people who might reasonably oppose a death penalty court.
UPDATE: Doug Berman has some further thoughts on other death-related topics. Via email, he also asks how I would decide whether a case counts as a "death" case. My initial inclination was to say that any case in which there is a legal issue that would result in a condemned person no longer being a condemned person would be a "death" case, but that might mean that my death court would rapidly turn into a general court of criminal appeals. I am not sure that would be so bad, although several commenters (including co-blogger Steve) appear to think that the Texas example shows that this is a mistake. I would love to hear more from those in the know.