Los Angeles Times on capital punishment: In a case that has put executions across the country on hold, the US Supreme Court will consider whether current procedures for lethal injection create such a risk of pain that they violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But even if the justices answer yes to that question, they will only be “tinkering with the machinery of death”, as the late Justice Harry Blackmun once put it. It’s past time for the court to conduct a more searching analysis of capital punishment in America, a penalty that is imposed so unevenly that it mocks the court’s motto of “Equal Justice Under Law”.