Why innocence don't matter within State's justice system, according to the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?

Question

"Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached." - Antonia Scalia ( 1936 - 2016)

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a guilty verdict properly reached. - courts everywhere, as of April 2025

" Convicting the innocent is widely accepted." https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/Natapoff_2jfr787v.pdf

After reading this analysis, now I came to think that 'innocence don't matter' implies that 'killings don't matter either'. As it turns out in Troy Davis' case, nine witnesses, 7 recanted, and 9th witness on the prosecutor's side is actually the killer, according to Prof. Valena Elizabeth Beety?

Answer 1

Innocence matters in the justice system. Your quote is fiction.

What Scalia actually said was:

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 habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

In re Davis, 130 S. Ct. 1, 3 (2009).

This does not mean that "innocence doesn't matter." It means that if the defendant had a fair trial, and the defendant was convicted, and a state court of appeals affirmed the conviction, then the United States Constitution does not require a federal district court to additionally conduct a habeas review of the conviction, every time a defendant claims that he is innocent.

Should an actually innocent person be set free? Of course. Does that mean that the Constitution prescribes the writ of habeas corpus as the only way to get the job done? No. There are other mechanisms, such as parole, state-court habeas proceedings, pardons, and so on.

What can we, public, learn from this simple sentence long quoted/credited to the late US Justice?

We can learn that when our understanding of the facts is based on Internet memes, we're likely to be completely misinformed.

We can learn that we should review reliable sources before believing something unbelievable.

We can learn that it is possible that everything we believe is actually incorrect because we haven't been paying attention to whether we're being lied to.

Answer 2

No human can ever know the facts on a criminal case.

Even an attentive eyewitness may be deceived by an elaborate hoax. Eyewitnesses who did not pay much attention until afterwards are a nightmare. An apparently voluntary confession in court may be coerced. And so on. But one of the functions of a legal system is to settle disputes with a certain degree of finality. To make that feasible, the systems grants each side of the conflict (prosecution and defendant in a criminal case, the sides in a civil dispute) a limited number of attempts in a formalized way to state their position. Once the case has been litigated, the objections overruled, the appeals filed and exhausted, at some point the verdict needs to stand.

The legal principle of non bis in idem holds that the state cannot bring a defendant to trial until the get an outcome they like. A similar principle holds to bringing evidence in defense. As the proverb goes, "everyone in jail is innocent. Just ask them ..."

Otherwise, what does a convict have to lose by filing for a new trial every month? A convict has plenty of time on his or her hands, and who knows, one of these new trials might work.

There are often some exceptions to the prohibition, like showing ineffective assistance of counsel, or showing deliberate misconduct, or new evidence which could not have been shown at the original trial. Not merely evidence which had not been shown at the original trial. How this is handled differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, some make it easier and some harder.

In many states, the pardon power is supposed to be used in cases where perceived justice and the legal outcome differ. Often the pardon system completely sidesteps the legal process.