Know-it-all Scalia wrong about death row case

Information for this comes from Huffington Post and New York Times articles.

Two African-American half-brothers have been exonerated by DNA testing, which determined that they did not commit the heinous rape and murder of an 11 year old girl in 1994.   They have spent three decades in prison, one on death row, the other serving a life sentence, for a crime they did not commit.

But it should not have taken DNA testing 30 years later to prove their innocence.   Any fair-minded jury, if given the details of the case as we now know them, would have likely acquitted them.

   1.  At the time of the crime, one brother was 15, and one was 19 with the mental ability of a 9 year old.

   2.  There was no physical evidence nor any witnesses linking the two brothers to the crime. 

   3.   Despite being teenagers, they were interrogated without legal or parental counsel.   Both confessed to the crime after being intimidated, threatened, and tricked by the police into believing that the other one had confessed.   They had so little understanding of what was happening that one of them, after signing the confession written by the police, asked if they could go home now.

   4.  They later recanted those confessions.

   5. There was another suspect at the time who was never interrogated and who he has since then committed other rapes/murders.   DNA testing now shows him to have been the killer. But in 1994 he was not even brought in for questioning, despite being listed as a suspect at one point.  

   6.  The prosecutor in the case was known as "the deadliest D.A." in the country for the frequency that he sought death penalties;   yet an inordinately high number of his convictions have subsequently been overturned.

But this is not just another story of DNA exonerations of black men who have spent years or decades imprisoned -- or executed -- for crimes they were later proven not to have committed.

Despite these six factors above, in 1994 the U. S. Supreme Court denied a request to review the case.    Justice Antonin Scalia was scathing (how often that adjective is used to describe Scalia's opinions) in his vote to refuse a review.   He wrote that the crime was so heinous that it would be difficult to argue against the death penalty.

But the SCOTUS review request was not about how heinous the crime was;   no one argued that it wasn't.   It was horrible.    The point of the review was police misconduct and questionable evidence.

That is why I have such contempt for Scalia's know-it-all arrogance and pig-headed obstinence.    His bias is so often so obvious to everyone but himself.  He has such fixed opinions and never seems to even consider that he might ever be wrong.  He repeatedly refuses to recuse himself when there is obvious conflict of interest.

In my opinion, he does not have the judicial temperament or procedural judgment required of a judge at any level, much less the highest court in our system.

Ralph