Four out of Nine Supreme Court Justices Are Okay With Executing the Innocent

By Paul Goodman
Back before I was a telco nerd, I was a criminal defense nerd, and I still follow developments in criminal justice.  While the criminal justice system evolves, one constant is that race still plays a huge role. If you want proof, there’s no better policy to examine than the death penalty. If you’re a member of a minority in this country, you’re far more likely to get the death penalty if you’re convicted of murder. For example, about fifty percent of murder victims are white; however, in cases which result in an execution, about eighty percent of the victims are white.  Similarly, a study of the death penalty in Georgia concluded the race of the defendant and the race of the victim play a huge role in whether the government executes the defendant:

Defendant’s Race	Victim’s Race	% Sentenced to Death
Black	White	22
White	White	8
Black	Black	1
White	Black	3

(That bottom statistic isn’t terribly trustworthy:  Out of 2,500 homicide cases in the study, only 65 involved a white defendant and a black victim, too small a sample to be reliable.)

Without getting into the whole death penalty debate, most people can agree that if we’re going to execute people, it should be people who are actually guilty.  We’ve almost undoubtedly executed innocent people.

Since 1973, over 140 people have been exonerated and freed from death row. There’s a host of reasons innocent people end up on death row, from the way memory works to bad science toprosecutorial misconduct. Like everything created by human beings, the justice system makes mistakes.

McQuiggen v. Perkins is a case about evidence of innocence. Under federal law, a defendant sentenced to the death penalty can only present new evidence of their innocence within a year of their last appeal. So if you uncover new evidence proving your innocence a year and one day after that appeal, you’re out of luck. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court, with a 5-4 vote, decided that in some circumstances, the one-year limit doesn’t apply.  That will save some innocent lives, but four justices were willing to strictly enforce the one-year limit even if it means killing people who have done nothing wrong.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia bitterly complained about the ruling. He takes his usual positions—the Court doesn’t have the authority to make the exception, the Court must strictly interpret Congress’ wishes, and so on. Here’s a particularly chilling excerpt:

There are many statutory bars to relief other than statutes of limitations, and we had never (and before today, have never) created an actual-innocence exception to any of them.

Scalia’s dissent argues that because Congress created the one-year limit, the Court does not have the authority to carve out exceptions to that limit.  The subtext, however is that Scalia has no problem with our government executing a perfectly innocent person. Neither do the three justices who joined the dissent. That’s a disturbing proposition, and completely ignores the pervasive racism of our criminal justice system.

Law is full of what we call “legal fictions.”  For example, when you click the “I agree” button when using the iTunes store, courts will assume you read and understood Apple’s terms and conditions, even if you didn’t.  Or get this one: If you buy a smart phone, by removing the shrink wrap, you agree to the terms and conditions which are printed in a booklet inside of the box. It’s one of those situations where courts decide, “we don’t know whether you agreed or not, but for the sake of efficiency, we’ll assume that you did.  Otherwise, courtrooms will be even more backlogged than they already are.”

There are times when the law shafts you for the sake of efficiency.  But what I’m most disgusted by is the fact that on May 29, 2013, there are Supreme Court justices who do not understand  that the government deciding to kill you should not be one of those times, especially when that government is more likely to kill you if you’re a person of color, and there’s a fair chance you don’t deserve to die.

via Greenlining.org