For Antonin Scalia

…man was made for the law, not the law for man.

That is all I can make of his bizarre statement that

This court 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.

At issue is whether a guy convicted of first degree murder should be executed when most of the evidence used to convict him is recanted by the witnesses and there’s a pretty good chance the guy is, you know, innocent.

Essentially, Scalia argues that it is more important to execute the innocent than to stop the System from killing somebody the System has found guilty according to the System.

I can respect people who make the argument that the State has the authority to execute at times. This is Catholic teaching (Romans 13). I can respect people (though I doubt they often really have the knowledge or expertise to know what they claim to know) who say that the death penalty remains necessary despite the Church’s insistence on minimizing its application as much as possible.

But I have no respect whatever for people who want to kill innocent people simply out of a robotic insistence that once a system has fed him into the execution machinery, they must die or the machinery will get gummed up. Scalia seems to me to advocate not mere difference of opinion with Evangelium Vitae but something more like open contempt with this dissenting opinion.