Scalia: an Utter Moral Failure
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will be attending the California State Bar Convention that's being held in San Diego. Justice Scalia will be there on Thursday, September 11.
Women Occupy San Diego and the San Diego Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild will demonstrate against the appearance at 11:30 a.m. Hyatt Grand, 1 Market Place. The demonstration focuses on the Supreme Court's attacks on the rights of women, workers, minorities, and honest elections.
Organizer Kate Yavenditti, a member of both organizations, states:
"As a lawyer and a feminist, I am outraged that the State Bar would invite Justice Scalia to speak at our convention. Justice Scalia has equated homosexuality to murder and bestiality, has said the Voting Rights Act is a racial entitlement, has stated that mere factual innocence is no reason to overturn a death sentence, and has consistently voted against women's rights, most recently in the Hobby Lobby case."
The demonstration features the five Justices who voted for Hobby Lobby with their statements and also presents the Occupellas (of Women Occupy San Diego) with appropriate songs.
Where: At California State Bar Convention in San Diego; Hyatt Grand Hotel,
When: Thursday, September 11 at 11:30 am,
CONTACs: Kate Yavenditti, (619) 917-7971, Anne Hoiberg, (858) 245-1677
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Scalia: An Utter Moral Failure
By Heather Digby Parton / Salon-RSN / 08 September 14
He doesn't think executing an innocent man matters. How on earth can such a depraved human be on our Supreme Court?
While my views on the morality of the death penalty have nothing to do with how I vote as a judge, they have a lot to do with whether I can or should be a judge at all. To put the point in the blunt terms employed by Justice Harold Blackmun towards the end of his career on the bench, when he announced that he would henceforth vote (as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall had previously done) to overturn all death sentences, when I sit on a Court that reviews and affirms capital convictions, I am part of "the machinery of death."
My vote, when joined with at least four others, is, in most cases, the last step that permits an execution to proceed. I could not take part in that process if I believed what was being done to be immoral.
– Justice Antonin Scalia
– Justice Antonin Scalia
One might wonder how he can stay on the court after the revelation last week that two convicted murderers he once described as lucky to be given the blessing of a lethal injection have turned out to be innocent. That's right, this is about the case everyone's been talking about — the two brothers, both mentally disabled, who were railroaded onto death row some 30 years ago with coerced confessions by a corrupt police department. As the New York Times reported:
The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim's body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time.
The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential harm from false, coerced confessions and of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent. Continue reading the article here
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