Discussion: Scalia Sought Death Penalty For Inmate Now Exonerated By DNA Evidence

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21

This pigfucking shitheel will never admit his mistakes. Is a massive MI too much to ask for?

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23

I read an article about a speech Scalia gave years ago. You aren’t far from the truth. The premise was that even if an innocent is executed God will know the truth and then it’s okay.

24

So not much of a believer in the Constitution I see.

26

The problem is not Scalia, although he does shoot off his mouth way too much. The problem is the injustice ingrained in our legal system. Way too many people are wrongly prosecuted whether they or guilty or not. It’s just too easy to put somebody away in this country.

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27

Uhh, hey Tony, just so we’re clear, go fuck yourself. A stronger letter will follow

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28

I don’t think I can agree with that at all, from an ethical perspective.

Is retribution a historical driver in punishment? Yes, I can accept that to be true. But there are lots of historical drivers which we have decided are not ethically defensible.

From an ethical perspective, the only role of “retribution” is as a stand-in for deterrence. That is, if all criminals get their “just rewards” then that will stop criminals from doing crimes. The thing is, as documented exhaustively elsewhere and alluded to above, death-penalty deterrence in almost all capital punishment crimes is hardly ever and perhaps never a factor, for various well-understood psychological reasons.

In short, retribution stripped of the benefits of both deterrence and rehabilitation (obvious in the case of capital punishment) is simply barbarism. That is not what we should be standing up for in our system of justice.

29

And in the 21 years since, the guilty parties have been free of responsibility for their crime. Regardless of the punishment the prosecutor is going for, that’s always the part that really bothers me.

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30

In my thankfully limited contact with municipal courts, they’re basically mills for processing people presumed to be guilty. The attitude of everyone – clerks, prosecutors, judge – is that if you’re there, it’s because you did something, and the details don’t really matter; they’re just hashing out the particulars of your punishment.

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31

If I actually believed in a just God, I would believe that some day soon Scalia would be standing at a podium somewhere declaiming his usual crap and there would suddenly be a brilliant flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap and then there would just be shit all over the place. I’m not holding my breath.

32

So this will mean that Scalia sees the error of his ways, and–

No, forget it. He just wants to kill people for the sense of power it gives him.

33

Indeed. It always strikes me as odd that I often see links from other sites to good articles at Slate and Salon, but whenever I go to those sites themselve you can never find them. Instead you just get crap from Daniel D’Addario and the rest of their stable of idiots.

34

The death penalty does not serve families of murdered victims. It serves the false belief that capitol punishment is a deterrent.