Mike Sacks

The Huffington Post

9/27/11

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens sat in his chambers Monday afternoon as his former colleagues — and his successor, Justice Elena Kagan — were behind closed doors on the floor below, spending the day digging out from the backlog of petitions for their review that had built up over the summer recess.

“I must say I’m enjoying the retirement and enjoying the fact that I don’t have to do all the preparation that goes into getting ready for the next term,” the 91-year-old retired justice said with a glimmer in his eyes during an interview with The Huffington Post.

But as anyone who has followed Stevens since his June 2010 retirement knows, he has kept up a work ethic and travel schedule that hardly befits a nonagenarian retiree.

Last November he published an essay in the New York Review of Books reminding readers of his late-career abandonment of all hope for the death penalty’s constitutionality. In a speech in May, he scolded the Court’s five-member conservative majority for overturning a wrongly imprisoned man’s jury award of $1 million for each of the 14 years he spent on death row due to prosecutorial misconduct. A week and a half later, he publicly criticized the Court’s decision finding the Westboro Baptist Church’s military funeral protests are protected by the First Amendment, siding instead with Justice Samuel Alito’s lone dissent. To cap things off, in yet another speech, Stevens offered his opinion that Osama bin Laden’s killing was carried out within the bounds of the law.

Read the entire article, Here.

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