Did the Supreme Court Recognize an Innocent Person's Right Not to Be Executed? | Hacker News Reader

Did the Supreme Court Recognize an Innocent Person's Right Not to Be Executed?

writ.news.findlaw.com

23 pointsAnon8423 comments

"Shocking as it sounds, Davis could end up proving his innocence and still be put to death."

Not really from a practical standpoint. No President or Governor would dare fail to pardon a man exonerated in court yet still sentenced to death, or it would be his career in the electric chair.

The Georgia Constitution vests the power of executive clemency in the Pardon and Parole Board. The Governor of Georgia can't pardon him.

This is a matter of state law. The President can't pardon him, at least there is no legal precedent for him to do so.

The president can pardon anyone for any reason except impeachment. See http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_pard.html for more information.

EDIT: I stand corrected to the comment below.

The president has pardon power for federal crimes only, he does not have pardon power for state crimes. The constitution is pretty explicit about this, qualifying with "offenses against the United States".

Wikipedia has a much more thorough explanation than I can come up with right now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon): In the United States, the pardon power for federal crimes is granted to the President of the United States under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution states that the President "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." The Supreme Court of the United States has interpreted this language to include the power to grant pardons, conditional pardons, commutations of sentence, conditional commutations of sentence, remissions of fines and forfeitures, respites and amnesties.

Where are the States Rights trolls when you need them?

Some recent news articles involving legal proceedings and executions in Texas:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1119362...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-tc-nw-texas-execute-0...

This does not solve it at all, because if he is pardoned he still spends the rest of his life in jail, doesn't he?

That would be a commutation. A pardon ends the sentence in its entirety.

Interesting. IANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the problem is not that the court wants to execute an innocent man, but that the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over the case. This would make sense in a way because the Supreme Court doesn't have the time to hear every death row inmates appeal. That is the duty of a lower court.

On a side note that reinforces the financial problem with capital punishment. It often costs more money to execute someone than simply lock them up for life.

As I understand it, this is a case of whether a re-examination or re-trial can be compelled based on future factual revelation, even if the trial was free from error.

I had always assumed, of course. It only makes sense that you never, ever want to punish the innocent and should always err on the side of being sure; particularly in the case of life- and death sentences.

If this man winds up being shown innocent and is still to be executed, it will be an absolute miscarriage of human justice and an indictment of our entire legal system.

Even if extraordinary powers are exercised to keep the State of Georgia from executing this particular man (and I can only hope they would be), the simple fact that our system would otherwise allow it to happen absent special dispensation is abhorrent to everything our nation supposedly stands for.

(EDIT: clarified)

> On a side note that reinforces the financial problem with capital punishment. It often costs more money to execute someone than simply lock them up for life.

That analysis misses a lot of important details.

Prisons kill people all the time. The only thing special about capital punishment is that we know when it's going to happen.

If you believe that the review for capital punishment is what's required to justify killing someone, then clearly a lot of people aren't getting anywhere near adequate review.

The way things are now, you're actually innocent, you're much better off being sentenced to death than sentenced to life - you've got much better odds of getting out alive.

If you're actually concerned about innoncent folks, death row is the least of your concerns.

Isn't this effectively a legal system DoS?

Only in America.

As long as the death penalty exists and supreme court judges can be of the opinion that "even if the district court were to find Davis to be innocent, there would still be nothing unlawful about executing him." there is still a long long way to go.

There's no law that says they can't execute him, because he was already tried, and convicted by jury. There were several eyewitnesses who testified.

Nothing is more important than a human life. Not all the institutions, policies, procedures, systems, etc. we have built.

If it's too much trouble to modify existing systems and instutions, the just use this handy formula for binary decision making:

  The greater of (existingResult) and (any instance of a HumanLife)

Dilemma solved.

I definitely agree with the humanist sentiment here. But an institutionalist would argue that the institutions, policies, procedures, systems have been set up to prevent countless losses of human life and human dignity. Undermining them for the sake of accommodating a single outlier would result in much more harm overall.

I don't necessarily agree with this line of argument. But people will keep making it, so it's worth formulating a response to it if you want to win the debate. (Not that rational discourse wins any debates these days.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky's dissolving of the consequentialist/deontologist divide can be applied here, I think: Nothing is more precious than a human life. But people die, so we have to make compromises to minimize the rate of unnecessary death; there's no use spending all your time and resources to build a completely death-proof car if you then die of untreated appendicitis you were too busy to have fixed.

In addition to that opportunity cost concern, there's knock-on effects, like you touched on, mustpax. Letting a killer live saves one human life now, but a policy of letting killers live may end far more human lives in the future. Personally, I don't think the data supports that, but if it did that's a choice we'd have to make.

Undermining them for the sake of accommodating a single outlier would result in much more harm overall.

The magnitude of "overall harm" is not an issue.

I simply adopted the axiom of "nothing is more important than a single human life" and came up with one approach to make sure that axiom is never violated. There may be better approaches.

Agreement on this axiom is a necessary first step. I'm not sure we have it. What a shame.

The most fundamental issue, I think, is where "two human lives" falls on your importance scale.

That pretty much prohibits any kind of law enforcement that utilizes potentially lethal force.

In real life, there is no escape from balancing potential risks (in this case, of innocents being killed) and benefits.

That pretty much prohibits any kind of law enforcement that utilizes potentially lethal force.

If you've ever worked in public safety or law enforcement, you'd realize how uninformed that opinion is.

Law enforcement officers don't carry weapons to use them, they carry them as deterrent. Good law enforcement officers regard the use of deadly force as either a last resort measure or just bad police work.

Nothing is more important than a human life? So you would, say, compel a thousand people into slavery in order to save one human life?

Article should be down-modded for misinformation. Here's Scalia's argument in plain language: Federal courts don't get override legal state convictions. Even if the prisoner files a writ of habeas corpus to a federal court, that court simply doesn't have the power under federal law to override the state conviction.

Scalia doesn't think that "actual innocence" (a legal term, not an English term, look it up) is any sound basis for granting federal courts that power. And once the door is opened to override the states on that ground, they'll basically be able to override it for anything.

If a state makes a mistake, the place to correct that is through state appeals and state supreme courts. The federal courts only come into it through Congressional legislation or unconstitutionality.

PDF of the dissent here: http://supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/08-1443Scalia.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com