re: #454 celticdragon

“This court,” Scalia pointed out, “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 court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

We are definitely in Alice through the looking glass territory here. Up is down, black is white and freedom is slavery.

When I originally saw that quote from Scalia, I thought of my debate team days long ago where we took it as a challenge to be able to argue ANY position on any issue, no matter how crazy or extreme or morally reprehensible. One of the approaches in that kind of argument-as-sport is to be extremely literal. Scalia’s quote above is probably literally correct, in that there exists no Supreme Court decision that explicitly forbids the execution of the innocent. That MIGHT have been all he meant by that. I would like to see the context in which that comment was made. Was Scalia really that cavalier about the state executing an innocent person?