I can't help but note this fine profile of Justice John Paul Stevens. I encourage folks to read it -- and will likely assign it to my students the next time I teach US Government. It gives a fine insight into a complex jurist of the highest caliber -- though one with whom I often disagree on the outcome and reasoning of cases.

But I'm struck by this story.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1941, Stevens enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later won a bronze star for his service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately. He has been the most outspoken critic of the death penalty on the current court.

One can look at the death penalty from many different points of view, and this is one upon which I differ with Stevens -- particularly because the death penalty is clearly authorized in the Eighth Amendment, and therefore unambiguously constitutional. But his view on the intentional, targeted killing of Yamamoto strikes me as misplaced.

Yes, killing a random soldier or sailor is in some ways different from making a particular officer a target, with the intent of ending his life. But for all his Stevens' moral qualms, I think it is important to remember that military commanders, not just the man in the trenches, are legitimate targets. There really is no moral distinction between the two. And I wonder -- would he feel the same had he instead helped locate Hitler and therefore brought about the demise of that evil man (and likely the end of the war)?