Noise

by Daniel Kahneman

the US Supreme Court held that a mandatory death sentence was unconstitutional not because it was too brutal but because it was a rule. The whole point of the mandatory death sentence was to ensure against noise—to say that under specified circumstances, murderers would have to be put to death. Invoking the need for individualized treatment, the court said that “the belief no longer prevails that every offense in a like legal category calls for an identical punishment without regard to the past life and habits of a particular offender.” According to the Supreme Court, a serious constitutional shortcoming of the mandatory death sentence is that it “treats all persons convicted of a designated offense not as uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of the penalty of death.”