If Troy Davis is innocent in the 1989 murder of off-duty Savannah cop Mark MacPhail, said The New York Times in an editorial, letting Georgia execute him would be “barbaric.” So “we are relieved” that the Supreme Court ordered a lower court to hear new evidence in the case—such as that seven key witnesses have since recanted their testimony. To argue against a rehearing, as Justice Antonin Scalia does in an “extraordinarily cold dissent,” is shocking.
That’s “a bit harsh” on Scalia, said Conor Clarke in The Atlantic. It may sound “terrible” to argue, as Scalia does, that the Supreme Court “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” But legally, it’s hardly a “crazy view.”
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