Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas embody the latter half of that sentence, while John Roberts and Sam Alito embody the first half.
But the majority opinion that Thomas wrote in Connick v. Thompson gives him the prize: Just Plain Old Meanest Supreme of All.
Here's what the case is about: in 1985 John Thompson was convicted of armed robbery and then later murder of the same man; he spent 18 years in jail in Louisiana, 14 of them isolated on death row. Several weeks before he was scheduled for execution in 1999, his private investigators discovered that the prosecutor in the original case had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him of the armed robbery -- which he was (falsely) convicted of and which was used to help convict him of the later murder of the victim.
Evidence withheld included: a blood sample that was shown not to be the defendent's; an eyewitness description that obviously did not match the defendent (6' and close-cropped hair vs 5'8" and a big Afro); the fact that the main witness had been paid by the victim's family for his testimony; and -- most important of all -- on his death bed a junior assistant DA had confessed to one of the prosecutors that he had withheld the evidence, and the fact of his confession had then been withheld for several years.
If it had not been for his private investigator unearthing these facts, Thompson would have been executed for a crime he did not commit. Another in the growing number of exonerations of those awaiting execution on death row.
When all this came to light, he had a new trial and was found innocent of both crimes after only 35 minutes of jury deliberations. That has not been challenged, and Thompson is a free man.
However, he was awarded $14 million compensation for this violation of his civil rights by unjust incarceration under death sentence, and that amount was upheld in the appeal court. But now the U. S. Supreme Court has overturned the right to compensation by the usual 5/4 conservative margin; and it is Thomas' majority opinion and his scornful tone that are so egregious and mean.
The case is based on the fact that the prosecutor had not followed the 1963 Brady v Maryland decision that requires prosecutors to turn over evidence that would tend to prove a defendent's innocence. This is established legal precedent and has not been challenged. However, the prosecutor in the case had died, so the District Attorney was sued for having failed to train his prosecutors about this legal obligation, which would have allowed Thompson to have been compensated by the government for which the DA worked.
Thomas wrote that the the district attorney (and the municipality that employs him) can't be held responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor -- never mind the fact that four other cases from this same office had been overturned for just this same reason and that it was far more than a lone prosecutor who covered up evidence of prosecutorial misconduct; and the fact that the DA himself has admitted to being ignorant of the Brady requirement and admitted that he stopped reading law books and opinions when he was elected in 1974.
Scalia wrote a concurring opinion that is equally lacking in human feeling. These two seem determined to prove something -- I'm not sure what. It has little to do with the law or with jurisprudence. It's about contempt for fellow human beings, I think.
Slate writes that "Their disregard for the facts of Thompson's trashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia . . . states that "the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors." But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor."
Slate concludes:
I don't think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don't ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. . . . But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that "this court has never held 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." It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim [to cruel an unusual treatment].The law awards no extra points for being pitiless and scornful. There is rarely a reason to be pitiless and scornful, certainly in a case of an innocent man who was nearly executed. It leads one to wonder whether Thomas and Scalia sometimes are [pitiless and scornful] just because they can be.
Anyone who want to read the scornful and dismissive details of the Thomas opinion and the Scalia concurrence can do so at http://www.slate.com/id/2290036/
Ralph
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