Conservatives of SCOTUS make a new rule: New evidence can only be in the form of dreams, acid trips

[ck4829]

On Monday morning, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court concurred: Barry Jones’ innocence is not enough to keep him off of death row. The state of Arizona can still kill Jones, even if there exists a preponderance of evidence that he committed no crime.

...

How can a defendant argue ineffective counsel if they can’t point to specific examples of that ineffective counsel? And how else can they do that other than by introducing new evidence not presented at trial, which would have likely acquitted them? Thomas is saying, in effect, that a petitioner has to rely on the record of a trial in which they were ineffectively defended—and their actual innocence is of secondary importance.

Thomas justifies the court’s decision by arguing that a federal review imposes “significant costs” on state criminal justice systems that includes potentially overriding “the State’s sovereign power to enforce ‘societal norms through criminal law.’”

...

Yet, for close Supreme Court-watchers, the decision is hardly surprising. Thirty years ago, the court issued a ruling that a death row inmate presenting belated evidence of innocence is not necessarily entitled to have a federal court hear their claims. Justice Antonin Scalia went even further, noting “there is no basis, tradition, or even in contemporary practice for finding that in the Constitution the right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after a conviction.” In an angry dissent, Judge Harry Blackmun described the majority’s reasoning as "perilously close to simple murder."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-supreme-court-just-said-in-in-shinn-v-ramirez-that-evidence-of-innocence-is-not-enough

So new evidence is bad, but what about citing a guy who believed that dreams were evidence? Surely, that's crazy, right?

In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overthrowing women’s rights to make a medical decision about their own bodies, Justice Samuel Alito cited 17th Century English Judge Sir Matthew Hale, who wrote that if a physician gave a woman with child a potion to cause an abortion, it was “murder.” The same Matthew Hale wrote that there was no such thing as marital rape, “for the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.”

This is the Matthew Hale who in 1662, sentenced two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender to death for witchcraft. Hale instructed the jury that there were such creatures as witches, “for the scriptures had affirmed so much.” The judges in the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts 30 years later based their decision to use spectral evidence (being accused of “bewitching” someone) on the published opinion of Matthew Hale that “the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons [witches], which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”

https://historicipswich.org/2022/05/06/the-u-s-supreme-court-and-its-relation-to-the-salem-witch-trials/

These 5 have gone and lost their minds.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. These "conservatives" are making one huge step backwards.

[Bettie]

2. Given the citations they use

I expect we'll be having witch burnings again. Soon.

I wish I was 100% kidding.

[dweller]

3. So all that new-fangled DNA evidence doesn't count ?

“there is no basis, tradition, or even in contemporary practice for finding that in the Constitution the right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after a conviction”






✌🏻

[ck4829]

5. And how many people have been convicted and the only evidence was a false confession?

[Scrivener7]

4. Spectral evidence is the only dependable evidence.