Today the Supreme Court announced a decision ordering a new trial for Troy Davis, who is on death row awaiting execution for the killing of a police officer. The conviction was based solely on witness testimony and the witnesses have now recanted. The decision was 6-2, with Scalia and Thomas dissenting from the majority.
In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia argued, “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.” Justice Clarence Thomas joined Scalia in the court minority.
Justice John Paul Stevens responded, “Imagine a petitioner in Davis’s situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man,” Stevens wrote. “The dissent’s reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning.”
Scalia doesn’t think it’s wrong to execute an innocent person. Since he’s supposedly a strict constructionist – is this what the founding fathers intended?
What’s that old quote:
Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
Of course, that came from an Englishman, William Blackstone.