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Hi and welcome to Amicus Slates Podcasts about the US Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slates Supreme Court correspondent, and my co-host today is Bronchitis.

So if you're wondering why I sound like this, I have a bad cold.

So the term opened this week without too much fanfare, although the court did hear a death penalty case on Wednesday.

The case was so gruesome that as the Washington Post's Bob Barnes noted, it has its own Wikipedia entry.

Here's just a Samuel Alito responding to the absolutely horrific facts detailed in the murders in Kansas versus

cars and Kansas versus police.

It would have to take responsibility for the decisions in these cases, which involve some of the most horrendous murders that I have seen in my 10 years here.

And we see practically every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country.

These have to rank as among the worst.

Now the court will be hearing at least six death penalty cases this term, and that's on a docket that's not yet completely filled.

As you'll recall, last term, the whole term closed with a pretty passionate smackdown on the question of whether lethal injection as used in Oklahoma violates the Eighth Amendment.

And on the last day of the term in Glossop v. Gross, the court by a five-form margin upheld that state's lethal injection protocol amid some very angry descents and concurrences.

It's so angry that I would say they bordered on personal.

...