Unfortunately, Scalia's right. According to the rule of after-discovered evidence (I became familiar with it when I was a reporter and covering a similar case), an innocent man can still be put to death if the evidence that could have exonerated him should have been brought forth during the original trial. There are exceptions, but that's the gist:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal trial court in Georgia to consider the case of Troy Davis, who is on death row in state prison there for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer. The case has attracted international attention, and 27 former prosecutors and judges had filed a brief supporting Mr. Davis.

Seven of the witnesses against Mr. Davis have recanted, and several people have implicated the prosecution’s main witness as the actual killer of the officer, Mark MacPhail.

The Supreme Court’s decision was unsigned, only a paragraph long and in a number of respects highly unusual. It instructed the trial court to “receive testimony and make findings of fact” about whether new evidence clearly established Mr. Davis’s innocence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court this month, did not participate.

The decision set off a sharp debate between Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia about Supreme Court procedure, the reach of a federal law meant to limit death row appeals and the proper treatment of claims of innocence.

“The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death,” Justice Stevens wrote in a concurrence joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, “clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.”

Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the hearing would be “a fool’s errand,” because Mr. Davis’s factual claims were “a sure loser.”

He went on to say that the federal courts would be powerless to assist Mr. Davis even if he could categorically establish his innocence.

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “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.”

And the culture of life continues...

Via The Telegraph UK:

A man convicted of shooting dead a store clerk during a robbery has become the 400th person to be executed by Texas since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The southern state accounts for almost a third of the 1,091 American executions over the last three decades, and this year it will be responsible for almost two thirds - 21 out of 35 judicial killings so far.

About 14 protestors gathered outside the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas, as Johnny Conner - who has never confessed to his crime - was executed by lethal injection last night.

Conner, 32, was convicted in 1999 of killing Kathyanna Nguyen, 49, by shooting her in the face during an attempted robbery of the Houston petrol station and convenience store where she worked.

"What is happening to me now is unjust and the system is broken," Conner said as he lay strapped to the execution gurney. Read more...

George Bush has turned the killing of human beings into an art form, so it comes as no surprise that he and Alberto Gonzales are attempting to fast track executions nationwide by doing away with the appeals process for death row inmates. (h/t Dcup)

I'm going to address this new ruling about the death penalty for pedophiles in another post, but Yahoo News, the AFP and Fanny Carrier need to issue a correction and an apology to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) immediately. They linked his bio and voting record to a man who has the same name---and is sentenced to death for rape of a minor.

The only man among more than 3,300 prisoners on death row who stands to lose his life under the new law is 42-year-old Patrick Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 2003 for raping his companion's eight-year-old daughter.

C&L's own Mark Groubert saw this last night and passed it on to me. This is outrageous. I doubt the Democratic Congressman knows about this, but now it'll be all over the Internet. A common criticism about bloggers I hear from the MSM is that we don't have editors monitoring our work. Ummm...Screen grabs below the fold.

Continue reading »

Lawyers for a death row inmate, including former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, sent fake letters from jurors asking California's governor to spare the man's life, prosecutors said Friday...read on

essays & effluvia

Upon signing the Schiavo Law, President Bush declared:

"It Is Wisest to Always Err on the Side of Life" 

Bush has been criticized for overseeing the execution of 152 convicted criminals while governor, more than any other governor in the history of the United States. Texas's penal system allows the governor to grant a single 30-day reprieve for each offense -- which then Governor Bush did for but one death row inmate.

Since that time, much of the nation's capital punishment system has come under increased scrutiny for being unfairly and unequally applied, as well as being riddled with procedural errors.

So much for "erring on the side of life."

Superhappyfun Blog

That's the title of this exciting article at declared:

"It Is Wisest to Always Err on the Side of Life"

Bush has been criticized for overseeing the execution of 152 convicted criminals while governor, more than any other governor in the history of the United States. Texas's penal system allows the governor to grant a single 30-day reprieve for each offense -- which then Governor Bush did for but one death row inmate.

Since that time, much of the nation's capital punishment system has come under increased scrutiny for being unfairly and unequally applied, as well as being riddled with procedural errors.

So much for "erring on the side of life."

In an unusual switch, Kenneth Starr is trying to overturn a case, instead of falsely making one!

From WaPo: Former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr yesterday took on a case unlike any he's had: the appeal of Arlington's only death row inmate.

As Salon has reported about Starr V.S. President Clinton:

What these carefully documented investigative stories underline is essentially this: In his zealous pursuit of the president, Kenneth Starr defiled "the temple of justice," to use his own righteous rhetoric. Lacking a fundamental sense of fairness and judicial proportion, Starr sought first to build his Whitewater real estate case against Clinton using irredeemably corrupt testimony, and then, when this failed, he latched onto Paula Jones' ill-fated civil suit, and then when that failed, he wired Linda Tripp and finally snared Clinton on adultery -- a crime that if aggressively pursued in Washington would depopulate our capital as thoroughly as the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh.

The new case involves Robin Lovitt:

Starr, a former federal judge and U.S. solicitor general, argued the case of Robin Lovitt before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond. He urged the judges to overturn Lovitt's conviction in the 1998 killing of an Arlington pool hall employee, who was stabbed six times with a pair of scissors.

If Lovitt is indeed innocent, let's hope for his sake that Starr has the same zeal for the (truth) hunt.