In arguments before the Supreme Court, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia presented the case of convicted murderer Henry Lee McCollum as a perfect justification for the death penalty.<\/p>\n
It turns out that McCollum was innocent<\/a>:<\/p>\n A little over two decades ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was dismissive of then-Justice Harry Blackmun\u2019s concerns about the death penalty. In fact, Scalia had a case study in mind that demonstrated exactly why the system of capital punishment has value.<\/span> Gov. Pat McCrory on Thursday pardoned two half-brothers who were exonerated of murder after spending three decades in prison.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The governor took nine months to make the decision, saying he thoroughly reviewed the pardons sought by Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Both men are intellectually disabled.<\/span> (emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n Scalia’s habit of assuming facts not in evidence is really starting to wear thin.<\/p>\n This is something that judges, at least judges outside of Texas, should never do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In arguments before the Supreme Court, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia presented the case of convicted murderer Henry Lee McCollum as a perfect justification for the death penalty. It turns out that McCollum was innocent: A little over two decades ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was dismissive of then-Justice Harry Blackmun\u2019s concerns about the death …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1011,1051,972,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-hypocrisy","category-justice","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182785"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span> As regular readers may recall<\/a>, Scalia specifically pointed to a convicted killer named Henry Lee McCollum as an obvious example of a man who deserved to be put to death. \u201cFor example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat,\u201d Scalia wrote in a 1994 ruling. [Callins v. Collins, which involved Texas, not North Carolina] <\/span>\u201cHow enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!\u201d<\/span>
<\/span> For Scalia, McCollum was the perfect example \u2013 a murderer whose actions were so heinous that his crimes stood as a testament to the merit of capital punishment itself.<\/span>
<\/span> Yesterday, McCollum was pardoned. Scalia\u2019s perfect example of a man who deserved to be killed by the state was innocent. North Carolina\u2019s News & Observer<\/i> reported<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n
If this story sounds at all familiar, it was last fall when a judge ordered the men released. The confessions appeared to have been coerced 30 years ago and new DNA evidence implicated another man<\/a> whose possible involvement had been overlooked at the time.<\/span>
<\/span>As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party used a McCollum photo on campaign fliers<\/a> to attack a Democratic candidate as \u201csoft on crime.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span> McCollum hadn\u2019t done anything wrong.<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n