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The Court's Duty

By Steve Hall

That's the title of an editorial in today's New York Times.  LINKWe are relieved that the Supreme Court has ordered a lower court to reconsider the conviction of a Georgia death row inmate who may be innocent. In a shocking dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dismissed the idea that the courts have a duty to ensure that they are not putting an innocent man to death. We hope that the Georgia court will see that justice is done. And that the other justices will make clear in future cases that the Constitution prohibits the execution of death row inmates who can produce convincing evidence that they are innocent. And:In their extraordinarily cold dissent, Justices Scalia and Thomas argued that the Supreme Court has never held that the Constitution prohibits executing an inmate who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is actually innocent...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).