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Hi and welcome to amicus, Slate's podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate 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 too much fanfare, although the court did hear a death penalty

case on Wednesday. The case was so gruesome that as the Washington Post Bob Barnes noted,

it has its own Wikipedia entry. Here's Justice Samuel Alito, responding to the absolutely horrific facts detailed in the murders in Kansas versus Carr 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-four margin, upheld that state's lethal injection protocol amid some very angry dissents and

concurrences, so angry that I would say they bordered on personal. Now, Richard Glossop himself,

who was the name party in that case, ate his third last supper last week before being escorted back to his cell when his execution was halted by the state of Oklahoma.

Again.

...