Is it constitutional to execute an innocent person?

Is it constitutional to execute an innocent person? That's nothing the legal system needs to worry about, says Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Sounds outrageous, but as Scalia pointed out in an opinion last week, the 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 (reviewing) court that he is 'actually' innocent.

The court has managed to avoid the issue for decades. In 1993, a majority said a Texas man who couldn't point to any legal flaws in his trial wasn't entitled to a hearing based on his claim of new evidence of innocence. But in that same ruling, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said he assumed that it would be unconstitutional to execute someone who came up with a "truly persuasive demonstration" of innocence.

Last week the court was faced with the case of Troy Davis, sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of an off-duty policeman in Savannah, Ga. Davis ran out of appeals before seven prosecution witnesses recanted their testimony against him, most of them saying they had been pressured by the police, and some pointing the finger at one of the remaining witnesses.

The Supreme Court has now ordered a federal judge in Georgia to hear the evidence despite federal laws that were designed to limit legal review after appeals are exhausted. As Justice John Paul Stevens put it in the majority opinion, allowing those laws to send an innocent person to the death chamber would be "arguably unconstitutional."

Scalia wrote a dissent that scoffed at Davis' claim of innocence and called the new hearing a "fool's errand."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?&entry_id=46139#ixzz0PVvYCyV7
 
 
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