OntheWilderSide

Supreme Court Orders Evidentiary Hearing for Death Row Prisoner Troy Anthony Davis; Rare Decision Could Result in New Trial

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I want to go back to that quote of Antonin Scalia. The “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. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.” What does that mean?

EZEKIEL EDWARDS: Well, the only thing that Scalia has right there is that it’s true that the Supreme Court has never actually held that it would be unconstitutional to execute an innocent person. But one point is that a number of justices, in their opinions in the past, have said that were that to be the issue we were faced with, it would unquestionably be unconstitutional. So, very few justices have any problem saying that it would be.

What’s quite disturbing is that Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas clearly take the position that even if a prisoner were able to demonstrably prove that they were innocent, and beyond any scintilla of a doubt, he would nonetheless say that there’s nothing that the Supreme Court or federal courts could do and that that person, nonetheless, would be executed and that that wouldn’t violate the Constitution. I would like to say that that is a minority position, thankfully, on the court.

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