Scalia Once Pushed Death Penalty For Now-Exonerated Inmate Henry Lee McCollum

[DonViejo]

A North Carolina death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence on Tuesday was once held up by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of someone who deserved to die.

When the court declined to review an unrelated death row case out of Texas in 1994, Justice Harry A. Blackmun issued a dissenting opinion arguing that capital punishment is cruel and unusual, and therefore unconstitutional.

Scalia answered back with an opinion of his own:

"For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat," Scalia wrote in Callins v. Collins. "How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!"

He was referring to Henry Lee McCollum, who at the time had already been on death row for 12 years. McCollum's conviction was overturned on Tuesday when DNA evidence implicated another man in the case.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/scalia-death-penalty_n_5756362.html

[leftyohiolib]

1. he's the biggest turd in the toilet.total human waste

[gordianot]

2. Reagan's real legacy lives on.

[Ron Obvious]

3. Hey, if you've had a fair trial...

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to execute you. According to Scalia, anyway.

[msanthrope]

4. Scalia, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas, Kennedy, and White all have that blood on their hands. nt

[Gormy Cuss]

5. And you won't hear Scalia regret that he was wrong on that.

"Regret" not being in his vocabulary.

"It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case -- not one -- in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit," Scalia wrote in the 2006 Kansas v. Marsh case. "If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby."

[avebury]

6. Remember this: Scalia says there’s nothing unconstitutional about executing the innocent.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/08/17/56525/scalia-actual-innocence/

Scalia says there’s nothing unconstitutional about executing the innocent.

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. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.
So in Justice Scalia’s world, the law has no problem with sending an innocent man to die. One wonders why we even bother to have a Constitution.