In his work “Commentaries on the Law of England,” Sir William Blackstone proffered that the law should err in favor of the defendant, lest it wrongfully punish the innocent (1765):<\/p>\n
All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/font><\/p>\n
In contrast, Reagan-nominated Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that the defendant’s only right was to a fair trial, subsequent evidence of innocence notwithstanding (2009):<\/p>\n
This Court has never<\/i> held that
\nthe Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant
\nwho has had a full and fair trial but is later able
\nto convince a habeas court that he is \u201cactually\u201d innocent.
\nQuite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question
\nunresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that
\nany claim based on alleged \u201cactual innocence\u201d is constitutionally
\ncognizable. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/font><\/p>\n
For people of Scalia’s ilk, the satisfaction of having punished someone<\/i> is its own reward. I take no joy from the death even of such demonstrably bad people as Scalia. But it is certainly better for the nation and better for the world, that one fewer medievalist jurist is around to poison modernity with opinions influenced by “The Malleus Maleficarum.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his work “Commentaries on the Law of England,” Sir William Blackstone proffered that the law should err in favor of the defendant, lest it wrongfully punish the innocent (1765): All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crackpots","category-politics","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1227,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions\/1227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}