Scalia cited exonerated inmates for death row justification
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The crime was so horrific that it has echoed for decades through North Carolina politics and beyond. In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.
On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing.
Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/opinion/the-innocent-on-death-row.html
A good write-up by the defendants' lawyer as to what went really wrong with the case:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/04/i-just-freed-an-innocent-man-from-death-row-and-im-still-furious/
This might sound cruel, but it's true: the US will be a better place when Scalia and his ilk die off and create vacancies on the Supreme Court.The crime was so horrific that it has echoed for decades through North Carolina politics and beyond. In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.
On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing.
Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/opinion/the-innocent-on-death-row.html
A good write-up by the defendants' lawyer as to what went really wrong with the case:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/04/i-just-freed-an-innocent-man-from-death-row-and-im-still-furious/
Hopefully it happens within the next 10-15 years so the inevitable Democratic presidents can marginalize the influence of Alito and Roberts.
This might sound cruel, but it's true: the US will be a better place when Scalia and his ilk die off and create vacancies on the Supreme Court.The crime was so horrific that it has echoed for decades through North Carolina politics and beyond. In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.
On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing.
Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/opinion/the-innocent-on-death-row.html
A good write-up by the defendants' lawyer as to what went really wrong with the case:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/04/i-just-freed-an-innocent-man-from-death-row-and-im-still-furious/
Hopefully it happens within the next 10-15 years so the inevitable Democratic presidents can marginalize the influence of Alito and Roberts.
We had our 8 years of Dem... onto another 12 of GOP