Scalia Thinks It's Ok to Commit Murder

This is an excellent opinion piece on statements Justice Antonin Scalia made in objection to the Supreme Court's decision to order a new hearing for Georgia death row inmate, Troy Davis:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Scalia's position is that if someone have been found guilty and sentenced to death in a procedurally correct trial, that it is constitutional to execute that person even if it is later discovered that the person convicted did not commit the murder.

He stated in a recent dissent over a recent grant of an original habeas corpus petition by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Troy Davis, in the face of post-trial recantations by almost all of the witnesses against him and a confession of guilt for the murder by someone else who is in prison:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually" innocent.

Professor Alan Dershowitz, at Harvard Law School, explains what this means:

Let us be clear precisely what [Scalia's dissent] means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: "Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she's dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you're dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you're innocent."

Scalia: It's OK To Execute Innocent People | Wash Park Prophet

This is also an excellent argument against the death penalty. As the Washington Post states, "Davis has come close to execution several times since he was convicted of the 1989 killing". In the hypothetical scenario above, what if the man's wife returns, alive, after the execution? Can people really be so naive as to think this scenario (or similar)could never happen? Lest we forget, The Dead Alive.

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