The decision did not expressly overrule "Stenberg", although many commentators saw it as having that effect. With the Court's majority in "Atkins v. Virginia" and "Roper v. Simmons", Kennedy agreed that the execution of the mentally ill and those under 18 at the time of the crime was unconstitutional. In "Kansas v. Marsh", however, he declined to join the dissent, which questioned the overall "soundness" of the existing capital punishment system. In 2008, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in "Kennedy v. Louisiana". The opinion, joined by the court's four more liberal justices, held, "[t]he Eighth Amendment bars Louisiana from imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death." The opinion went on to state, "The court concludes that there is a distinction between intentional first-degree murder, on the one hand, and non-homicide crimes against individuals, even including child rape, on the other. The latter crimes may be devastating in their harm, as here, but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, they cannot compare to murder in their severity and irrevocability." The opinion concluded that in cases of crimes against individuals, "the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim's life was not taken." Kennedy wrote the majority decision in "Coeur Alaska, Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council" (2009), which involved an Alaskan mining company that planned to extract new gold from a mine that had been closed for decades using a technique known as "froth-flotation". This technique would produce approximately 4.5 million tons of "slurry", a thick waste product laced with toxic elements such as lead and mercury. The company intended to dispose of the waste in a nearby lake, which would eventually decrease the depth of the lake by fifty feet and flood the surrounding land with contaminated water. While federal law forbids "[t]he use of any river, lake, stream or ocean as a waste treatment system", Kennedy's decision stated that pollutants are exempt from this law so long as they have "the effect of ... changing the bottom elevation of water". Justice Ginsburg's dissent stated that such a reading of federal law "strains credulity" because it allows "[w]hole categories of regulated industries" to "gain immunity from a variety of pollution-control standards". Kennedy's concept of liberty has included protections for sexual orientation.