[Silver]

So why would they go out of their way to audition for a role as modern day Pontius Pilates?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/us/18scotus.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Seven of the witnesses against Mr. Davis have recanted, and several people have implicated the prosecution’s main witness as the actual killer of the officer, Mark MacPhail.

Ok...

“The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death,” Justice Stevens wrote in a concurrence joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, “clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.”

Sounds reasonable.

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

Really? Way to wash your hands of the blood of a man who is possibly (probably) innocent, you hypocritical religious assholes.

“It ‘would be an atrocious violation of our Constitution and the principles on which it is based’ to execute an innocent person,” Justice Stevens wrote, quoting Judge Barkett’s dissent.

Activist judge!

 

[Andyman_1970]

I found this on Scalia:

“ This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul.... [T]he core of his message is that government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God.... Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.... I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next?... For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!... The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible. We have done that in this country (and continental Europe has not) by preserving in our public life many visible reminders that—in the words of a Supreme Court opinion from the 1940s—"we are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."... All this, as I say, is most un-European, and helps explain why our people are more inclined to understand, as St. Paul did, that government carries the sword as "the minister of God," to "execute wrath" upon the evildoer."

That seems pretty F'd up to me. To kill and inocent person is to kill and inocent person, period, regardless of their destination in the afterlife. He even says its a "grave sin" but then goes on to what appears to excuse it.