The Supreme Court this week permitted a further appeal in the case of Troy Davis, with Antonin Scalia offering a blistering dissent. Noted international human rights lawyer, Columbia professor, and Harper's Magazine editor and blogger Scott Horton offered this summary:
the appeal of Troy Davis, a Georgia athletics coach tried and convicted of the murder of an off-duty policeman working as a security guard at a Burger King. Following the conviction in 1991, seven of the witnesses who testified against Davis recanted, several of them fingering the last major witness to appear against Davis as the actual killer. In a series of sharply divided decisions, the Georgia Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals refused to review his case, largely on technical procedural grounds. Each of these decisions discloses an ideological fault line: movement conservative judges want to proceed forthwith to an execution, others want to give close consideration to the new evidence. Yesterday the Supreme Court sent the case back to the District Court with instructions to examine Davis’s habeas petition. But the move provoked a sharp dissent from Antonin Scalia, who used the occasion to deliver a lecture on the Constitution and its relationship to justice:This 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.In other words, Scalia’s Constitution does not guarantee a man who has been convicted and sentenced to death–but who is actually innocent–a review of his case. It is certainly true that the Constitution provides no absolute guarantee of justice. But Scalia’s view effectively puts an expense meter on the justice process. Once the process has run through certain steps, that’s it. In his view, it really shouldn’t matter that subsequent evidence establishes that the conviction is mistaken. It’s more efficient simply to implement the decision and execute the innocent man.
