Justice Scalia's Arguments Criticized as Boston Looks at Innocence By the Numbers

Call me hopelessly naive but I think even one innocent person in jail for a crime he or she did not commit - and it doesn't have to be a capitol crime either, which can invoke the death penalty - is too many.

From the Boston Globe:

ALAN NEWTON LEFT PRISON last week after serving 22 years for a rape he didn't commit. Though eligible for parole for nearly a decade, he was repeatedly denied his freedom because he insisted on his innocence. Through repeated motions and letters from his prison cell, Newton relentlessly sought the DNA testing that eventually cleared him. But it took the New York City Police Department nearly a dozen years to locate that evidence-even though it was stored in the original evidence barrel the whole time-years Alan Newton spent in prisons like Attica and Sing Sing.

The Newton exoneration stands as a poignant rebuke to Justice Antonin Scalia's concurring opinion in the recent Supreme Court case of Kansas v. Marsh. In that death penalty decision, Scalia went far out of his way to attack what he termed the death penalty ``abolition lobby." In his analysis, Scalia joined a growing chorus of death penalty proponents who claim that our criminal justice system is nearly perfect in adjudicating guilt and innocence. Indeed, Scalia devoted entire pages of his opinion to excoriating several of his fellow justices for succumbing to what he believes are unfounded fears of fallibility created by the extensive attention garnered by the exonerated.

A principal flaw in Scalia's argument is that it is grounded in misleading statistics from a pro-death penalty piece published on the op-ed page of The New York Times in January. In the piece, which Scalia both cites and quotes at length, Joshua Marquis, the district attorney of Clatsop County, Ore., and an oft-quoted spokesperson for the prosecutorial lobby, asserts that the conviction of the innocent is essentially unheard of in our system of criminal justice.