Attorneys for Patrick Kennedy...

Attorneys for Patrick Kennedy, the only person on death row in the U.S. for a non-homicide offense, have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether a death sentence for a crime where the victim was not murdered is constitutional. Patrick O. Kennedy, 42, is the only person currently on death row in the United States for a crime of child molestation. He was convicted in 2003 for the March 2, 1998 aggravated rape of his then eight year old step-daughter, then sentenced under a 1995 Louisiana law that allows the death penalty for the rape of a child under the age of 12. (see Aug. 23, 2003) Only a handful of states have laws that would allow a death sentence for such a crime. No one has been executed for a non-homicide offense since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and Kennedy is the only person under a death sentence for such an offense.
There has not been an execution for rape in the United States since 1964. The U.S. Supreme Court last looked at the constitutional question in 1977, when it held that the death penalty for the rape of an adult was unconstitutional, calling the death penalty "grossly disproportionate" and "excessive" in that instance. In 1997, the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to Louisiana's child-rape law because the defendant had not been sentenced to death.