The Pope must have gone to law school

A friend recently sent me a posting about Troy Davis from a CNN news blog. It features various quotes by Spencer Lawton, the former Chatham County prosecutor, which is spot on, regardless of what one might think of the death penalty or the Troy Davis case:

Lawton questioned Pope Benedict XVI's interpretation of the intricacies of Georgia law. "His holiness has expressed his objection to the death penalty in the case, although it's noteworthy he didn't constrain himself to the issue of morality of the death penalty - he went on to comment on the sufficiency of evidence in the case," Lawton said regarding the pope's recent comments. "This is not something I had previously thought the Holy See had expertise in, that is to say Georgia's evidentiary rules."

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Scalia’s thought process: “Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway.”

Way back in 1989, I happened to be watching Episode Two of a PBS series entitled "Ethics in America." It was a terrific 10-part series that considered compelling topics in ethics. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a participant in Episode Two. You can see all of the episodes, including Episode Two here (click on the little "VoD" button next to Episode 2). You might be wondering how I could possibly remember a particular comment from a particular episode from 20 years ago. I do remember: it was burned into my memory because it was so utterly bizarre. At about the 31-minute mark, the moderator (Charles Ogletree, Jr.) posed a hypothetical. What if you were an attorney and your client told you that he committed a murder a couple years ago? The clear answer is that the attorney-client privilege protects that admission; if you were that man's attorney, you could not tell anyone else what your client told you in the course of your consultation with him. Things got much more interesting, as the moderator elaborated on the hypothetical. Assume that your client tells you that after he committed the murder, the police erroneously arrested the wrong man. Further, assume that man has been found guilty by a jury and he is scheduled to be executed. As the attorney, what can you do to protect the life of an innocent man who is about to be executed for a crime committed by your own client who is confessing his guilt to you? This is a tough issue, right? At the moment where the moderator indicated that the innocent man was about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit, Justice Scalia spoke up: "Well, he probably did something else wrong anyway." You can see and hear this statement for yourself at 31:50 in the video. Although I'm certain that Justice Scalia would claim that his utterance was a "joke," (after all, other participants laughed), it makes you wonder, especially in light of a recent case decided by the United States Supreme Court, In re Davis.

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