I read something horrifying today - yeah, I know: outrage overload. Our national culture has deteriorated into a series of hyperbolic, hyperventilating half-wits hyping hypocrisy with a level of willful, malicious ignorance, apathy & inanity that defies simple description (see?).
And yet, I was well and truly irked at the continued deterioration, erosion, and deconstruction of the underlying tenets of our nation, and of our judicial system.
The "something horrifying" was just the above-the-fold part of today's Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Legalese Edition by Mark Sumner.
The key to the outrage is the asinine arrogance and complete lack of respect that "Justice" Antonin Scalia packs his ill-formed (malformed?) legal opinions with.
Essentially, Scalia states that if an innocent person was legally convicted of a crime, the state has no obligation to revisit the conviction based on the surfacing of new evidence that can clearly establish that innocence.
That's not a "narrow" reading of the law, or something you could simply say is a "conservative" stance. That's a complete abdication of responsibility, of duty, of accountability, and of justice.
There's more. Over the flaky pastry cornucopia for a bit more, and then some. No worries - there's no complicated legal stuff, but plenty of opportunity for others to chime in and elucidate, illuminate, clarify and distinguish...
Our founding fathers set the basis for our judiciary on the premise that "better that n guilty persons go free than 1 innocent suffer."1 Even more to the heart of the issue, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, all enshrine and espouse the principle that we have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Our right to liberty and freedom, which has been touched upon in courts at the very least through the concept of habeas corpus, is a core tenet of our nation and the laws that form is very foundational cornerstone.
2 To ignore the rights of someone who was wrongfully - but legally - convicted is an insult that sets the precedent that our very rights are, at best, written not in the blood of patriots and tyrants but with the excrement of animals, and not written on parchment but among the flotsam and jetsam cast across the national landfill.
To justify and deny any obligation to revisit the possibility of freedom wrongfully deprived is the worst type of arrogant hypocrisy by anyone, never mind an alleged "justice" of the court.
Antonin Scalia has been part of a horrifying trend of precedent-setting cases that undermines that founding principle, setting up the exact type of situation that John Adams himself warned of when he cited Blackstone's ratio in part of his opening defense of the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre.3
If folks prefer a Biblical precedent, you can check out Genesis 18:23-32 and Exodus 23:7, for starters. In the Genesis excerpt, the town had already been "convicted" - judgement passed - but then the evidence of innocent people was presented. The innocent people were allowed to be saved; the town still condemned.
For those who claim that the US is based on Christian principles, doesn't this qualify, or is this one of those "exceptions" you're willing to overlook?
...any justice system that does not, in my opinion, actually seek justice - and, in particular, does not give urgent priority to righting the wrongs of an erroneous, false conviciton - isn't a system of "justice."
Antonin Scalia, your "past-due" date came and went. You're starting to rot more noticeably now - perhaps you should resign.
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Note to folks: The content above was mostly posted in another form on Facebook originally. I pulled it together, shuffled it a bit, and pub'd here as a diary 'cuz it still sticks in my craw. Unrelated, 'cept incidentally and through the title, I've included the video below. Please enjoy.
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Footnotes
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1 The Blackstone Formulation, also (perhaps better) known as "The Blackstone Ratio." See also: n Guilty Men by Alexander Volokh, 146 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 173 (1997).
Regardless of whether you hold that the number of guilty persons should be "n" where n=1, 3, 10, 99, or any positive integer, the whole premise was that justice should err on the side of the innocent, which would tend to obligate the justice system to treat the wrongful conviction of an innocent as a high priority, and address it immediately to restore justice.
2 I'm pretty sure "habeas corpus" isn't the same thing, but I feel it is directly relevant to the discussion nonetheless. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on it; hopefully others will have more pertinent legal page references that they can provide in comments.
3 From the Blackstone's Ratio page on Facebook:
January 1770 in Boston, Massachusetts
When nobody else could be found to defend the soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre, John Adams stepped in to do so, and offered this argument in defense of Blackstone's Ratio:
'It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
'But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.'
— John Adams (1770)