Some years back, a popular classicin 20th Century literature introduced a doctor who was part of a flight crew stationed in the Mediterranean during WWII. Doc Daneeka was very much invested in self-preservation, and he resented the Air Force for this assignment when he was afraid to fly.
A small craft went down into the sea, and the manifest for the flight included Doc Daneeka. The Casualty Report was all very properly issued and the resultant telegram to Mrs Daneeka back in long Island duly followed and a death certificate for the NSLI Insurance and Death Compensation was produced, and it was all According to Hoyle, or Department of Defense regulations, without a comma out of place. However tragic the event, none could fault the regulations and the process of the government in response to it!
However, one did.
Doc Daneeka.
Although the manifest indeed listed him as a passenger, Doc Daneeka had not actually been aboard the fatal flight, a fact which he was present on the ground to argue. To no avail.
So he continued his campaign to derail the vast train of federal procedure, to the extent of writing to his family back home to inform them of this confusion of history with process. And the family responded - by asking the Defense Department to please stop this harassment from some aberrant nut who was mocking their bereavement, which had been made somewhat easier by more proceeds from the Air Force and the VA and the insurance company than ever had been won by the Doc's medical practice.
Eventually, the letters from the good, or maybe less than average, doctor ceased.
I mention this now because of a recent rantby one of your Extreme Court Injustices, and not even the craziest*. Scalia is quoted as follows, to which I can add nothing but open-mouthed amazement.
“This court,” Scalia pointed out, “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
Further comment here.
The law, according to this reading, is but a pageant, a parade, a charade by which solemn meaningless ceremony be performed out of some ancient sense of duty, like some dreary opening of Parliament. Actual truth, guilt, or innocence no longer matter, and Salia says they never did. Every single court session, by this reading, is but a show trial.
I think it should be noted, as I'm surprised it hasn't been more remarked.
*
I'm a conservative, I'm a textualist, I'm an originalist, but I'm not a nut.
- Scalia, on the difference between him and Uncle Thomas, as quoted by Jefferty Toobin.