The Supreme Court and the Rule of Law

In a recent post on SCOTUSblog, Lyle Deniston notes the suspicion of judges held by many members of the Supreme Court. In the oral arguments for Tibbals v. Carter and Ryan v. Gonzalez,  attorneys for the states of Ohio and Arizona argued that judges should not be permitted to institute indefinite stays of execution for defendants who are temporarily incompetent to participate in their own appeals. As Deniston points out, the justices were highly skeptical of the practice, largely because they assumed the judges would not be impartial in its implementation. At one point, Densiton refers to Justice Alito 'who suggested that a lot of judges “don’t like the death penalty,” so why should the Court leave to their discretion the issue of stays for incompetency in these death penalty cases?'

This is an alarming attitude for the Court to take, in part because it suggests their assumption they they themselves would be incapable of judicial neutrality when faced with similar problems. Why should we trust judges' discretion? Because their job -- the very name of their job -- requires it. They are there solely to use their discretion. What can it possibly mean for the highest court in the land to say, or even to imply, that we can't trust the judiciary? How can our system, or the very concept of the rule of law, stand up under such skepticism -- or is it cynicism?