[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, GA., MISS., OKLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 15




TEXAS----impending execution

Texas Inmate Set to Die Tuesday for Dallas-Area Store Holdup


A suburban Dallas convenience store clerk was on the phone with his girlfriend 
when 2 people, 1 of them carrying a sawed-off shotgun, walked in. Gregory 
Martin told her he believed he was about to be robbed and to call police.

Plano officers found 15-year-old Christopher Vargas standing over Martin's 
lifeless body and 18-year-old Gustavo Garcia hiding in a beer cooler with the 
shotgun near him. Authorities later determined the weapon had been used a month 
earlier in a robbery at a Plano liquor store where the cashier, Craig Turski, 
was fatally shot.

Garcia, now 43, is set for lethal injection Tuesday night in Turski's 1990 
slaying. He'd be the third prisoner executed this year in Texas, which puts 
more inmates to death than any other state.

A federal judge said Friday he won't stop the execution, and the Texas Board of 
Pardons and Paroles refused a clemency petition. No additional appeals are 
expected, Seth Kretzer, one of Garcia's lawyers, said Monday.

In the federal court appeal, Garcia's attorneys had argued that lawyers at his 
trial and in earlier appeals failed to uncover details of an abusive and 
alcohol- and drug-influenced youth - disclosures that could have convinced 
jurors to spare him from a death sentence. They also said they needed 
additional time to investigate those claims.

"Garcia's guilt is clear," responded Fredericka Sargent, an assistant Texas 
attorney general.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month refused to review an appeal that raised 
questions about deficient legal help, and last week turned down a request for a 
rehearing.

Court documents show Garcia, who has spent more than half of his life on death 
row, shot Turski in the abdomen on Dec. 9, 1990, then reloaded and shot the 
43-year-old cashier in the back of the head. A month later, Martin, 18, was 
shot in the head after he was taken to a back room.

In a statement to police following his arrest for Martin's killing, Garcia said 
he'd ordered Turski to his knees when a customer entered the store.

"I then panicked," he said. "I shot the clerk with the shotgun."

On Thanksgiving in 1998, Garcia and 5 other inmates were scaling a pair of 
10-foot-high prison fences when corrections officers opened fire on them and 
they surrendered. A 7th convict, Martin Gurule, was shot but managed to flee, 
making him the 1st inmate to escape Texas death row since a Bonnie and Clyde 
gang member broke out in 1934. Gurule's body was found about a week later in a 
creek a few miles from the prison, and an autopsy showed he drowned.

"At least I can say I tried," Garcia said of the escape attempt in a 1999 
interview with The Associated Press. "Facing execution is scarier." He declined 
an interview request as his execution date neared.

Vargas, Garcia's partner in both fatal robberies, was tried and as an adult, 
convicted and is serving life in prison. His age made him ineligible for the 
death penalty.

At least 9 other Texas inmates have execution dates set for the coming months, 
including 3 in March.

(source: Associated Press)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Parole board set to meet Tuesday on condemned Houston County killer Travis 
Hittson


The state Board of Pardons and Paroles is scheduled to hear clemency requests 
on behalf of condemned Houston County killer Travis Clinton Hittson on Tuesday.

The board has invited Hittson's representatives to meet with the board at 9 
a.m. to lay out a case for clemency.

Hittson is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Feb. 17 at the 
Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson.

A Houston County Superior Court judge issued the execution order for Hittson 
for the 1992 murder of Conway Utterbeck.

In February 1993, Hittson was convicted of murder, theft by taking, aggravated 
assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime. The jury 
recommended a death sentence, which was imposed in March 1993.

In Georgia, the parole board has the sole constitutional authority to commute, 
or reduce, a death sentence to life with the possibility of parole or to life 
without the possibility of parole.

(source: macon.com)






MISSISSIPPI:

Attorney General presents death penalty options


With the recent expiration of Mississippi's lethal injection drugs, Mississippi 
Attorney General Jim Hood released a legislative agenda that could effectively 
nullify the logistical and ethical issues particular to the cocktails.

In place of lethal injection drugs, which can be difficult to acquire and 
properly administer, Hood proposed 3 alternative execution methods for 
administering the death penalty in a press release on Jan. 27.

If Hood's agenda is realized, Mississippi's 48 death row inmates could each 
face either the electric chair, a firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia.

Mississippi previously used the electric chair during a period ending in 1952. 
Though Mississippi never employed firing squads, other states have, and it is 
still an accepted method of execution in Utah. Nitrogen hypoxia stands alone as 
Hood's only untested proposed method.

Oklahoma adopted use of Nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method in 2015 and, 
supported by a report by Michael Copeland, an associate professor of criminal 
justice at East Central University in Oklahoma.

According to the report, "An execution protocol that induced hypoxia via 
nitrogen inhalation would be a humane method to carry out a death sentence."

The report based its argument on the work of right-to-die advocacy groups, such 
as the Final Exit Organization, which provides support and resources to the 
terminally ill considering suicide. Such groups commonly suggest inert gas 
hypoxia through "exit bags" as a preferred suicide method because it is 
considered humane and peaceful.

To carry out a sentence through nitrogen hypoxia, a convict would breathe 
normally, inhaling the inert gas until losing consciousness and eventually 
succumbing to oxygen deprivation.

USM associate professor of political science Robert Press said the issue of 
humane treatment extends well beyond method used to carry out the death 
penalty.

"What I innately feel is a human rights abuse [is] to take another life," Press 
said. "That's not a religious point of view, it just simply seems inhumane."

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the South has the highest 
murder rate at 5.3 per 100,000. The South also holds the highest execution rate 
with over 1,145. Mississippi currently has 48 inmates on death row.

Press said though people often feel anger toward death row convicts, the death 
penalty is simply unnecessary.

"I understand the feeling of someone who's had a victim in their family been 
killed - that there is this desire for 'justice' or even revenge," Press said. 
"I fully understand that it's very human, but it's not an effective way to 
prevent that from happening again. And if one looks at the punishment of life 
imprisonment, sometimes without parole, that is punishment."

According to Blake Feldman, a Mississippi ACLU advocacy coordinator, the death 
penalty is not just a poor form of deterrence. It is also unconstitutional.

"With civil liberties, the first thing you think of is the Bill of Rights and 
then incorporate it and how it applies to the states is the Fourteenth 
Amendment," Feldman said. "A lot of death penalty issues get in through due 
process and the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment."

Feldman said the inmates' potential innocence also contributes to the troubling 
nature of capital punishment.

There have been 4 exonerations in Mississippi and over 156 nationally since 
1971, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

(source: studentprintz.com)






OREGON:

Author to discuss 1940s Linn County murder, unjust execution


Oregon State University will hold a book reading and discussion on Wednesday 
about a black man almost certainly unjustly executed for a 1943 murder on a 
train near Tangent.

"The Color of Night: Race, Railroaders and Murder in the Wartime West," was 
written by Western Oregon University History Professor Max G. Geier, who will 
give his presentation from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 5th floor of the 
Valley Library's Special Collections and Archives Research Center.

Light refreshments will be served.

Geier's book tells the story of a Robert Folkes, a train cook from South 
Central Los Angeles who was charged with the murder of Martha James despite 
inconsistent and contradictory eyewitness accounts.

James, a white and southern woman newly married to a Navy pilot, was killed in 
her train sleeping berth near Albany.

The investigation into the case and the trial in Linn County Circuit Court 
garnered sensational media coverage at a time of intense wartime fervor and 
extensive black domestic migration.

Folke's controversial execution in the gas chamber reshaped how Oregonians and 
others in the West thought about race, class and privilege, according to a news 
release.

"Prosecutors, police and reporters colluded, in wartime, to stage the trial as 
a moralizing ritual for a public purpose that had little to do with justice," 
reads a summary of the book on the OSU Press website.

The crime and its aftermath also galvanized civil rights activists, labor 
organizers and community leaders into challenging the flawed judicial process 
and ultimately the death penalty in Oregon.

Attendees at the book reading also will get a sneak peak of a new oral history 
project under development at Special Collections and Archives - interviews with 
20th century African American railroad porters.

(source: Albany Democrat-Herald)






USA:

The Harrowing Testimonies of Death Penalty Executioners


Texas has administered the death penalty to a record 531 people since the state 
reinstated capital punishment in 1982. While Texas's numbers are particularly 
high, state executions are also legal in 30 other states:

The death penalty was a divisive issue in a recent Democratic debate, and made 
headlines earlier this week when the state of Missouri was accused of evading 
taxes by paying executioners in cash.

The accounts of the "anonymous execution teams" who implement the death penalty 
are equally chilling, and rarely reach the public sphere, because their 
identities are protected by stringent state laws. Rare interviews from retired 
corrections officers, wardens, and prison chaplains, as well as those included 
in the 2000 Peabody Award winning radio documentary "Witness to an Execution" 
give us glimpses of executioners and their experiences.

Here are the testimonies of 6 former executioners, wardens and prison personnel 
who have administered or supervised capital punishment.

1. Jerry Givens, former Virginia Executioner from 1982-1999.

"If I had a choice, I would choose death by electrocution. That's more like 
cutting your lights off and on. It's a button you push once and then the 
machine runs by itself. It relieves you from being attached to it in some ways. 
You can't see the current go through the body. But with chemicals, it takes a 
while because you're dealing with three separate chemicals. You are on the 
other end with a needle in your hand. You can see the reaction of the body. You 
can see it going down the clear tube. So you can actually see the chemical 
going down the line and into the arm and see the effects of it. You are more 
attached to it. I know because I have done it."

2. Jennie Lancaster worked with the North Carolina Department of Corrections 
from 1977-2013 as a warden and eventual Chief Deputy Secretary.

"At job interviews we don't ask things like, 'So how do you feel about wheeling 
away a body?' But maybe we should. It's not a role many of us picture ourselves 
playing."

3. Fred Allen participated in 130 executions as Captain of Corrections at Walls 
Unit Prison in Huntsville, Texas before he had a breakdown in 1998.

"I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in 
me and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife 
asked 'What's the matter?' and I said 'I don't feel good.' And tears - 
uncontrollable tears - was coming out of my eyes. And she said 'What's the 
matter?' And I said 'I just thought about that execution that I did 2 days ago, 
and everybody else's that I was involved with.' And what it was was something 
triggered within and it just - everybody - all of these executions all of a 
sudden all sprung forward."

4. Steve J. Martin began his corrections career on death row at age 23 at Texas 
State Penitentiary's Ellis Unit.

"The whole thing made me step out of my role professionally, and touched me on 
an emotional level. I began to realize that this is how these things happen, 
executions. We do these things that personally you would normally never be 
involved in, because they're sanctioned by the government. And then we start 
walking through them in a mechanical fashion. We become detached. We lose our 
humanity."

5. Ron McAndrew, a former Warden at Florida State Prison, worked with the 
department of corrections from 1978-2000.

"Searching my soul for answers that would satisfy the question on just why were 
we killing people and why our governor and politicians would do their 'chest 
pounding' over these ghastly spectacles was difficult. I began to remember 
myself as the person who went to Florida State Prison with a firm belief in the 
death penalty. And even though I still professed this belief, the questions of 
why we were doing this and if it were necessary, would not leave my mind. While 
appalled by the physical act of tying a person to a chair and burning him to 
death, I did not deny the reasons for the act. Here I want to say that one must 
be careful in searching his soul...one may just find that God is there and that 
He does not support the barbaric idea that man should execute man...After 23 
years in Corrections, I have come to the conclusion that killing people is 
wrong. We have no business doing it, except in self-defense, in defense of 
someone else or in defense of the nation. And it's wrong for us to ask others 
do it for us."

6. Reverend Carroll Pickett served as the "death house" Chaplain from 1980-1995 
at Walls Unit Prison in Huntsville, Texas.

"After I had attended a few executions I developed a procedure. I would spend 
time with the condemned man working out what their last words would be so that 
I could pass the information on to the warden and make sure the killing wasn't 
started until the prisoner had finished speaking. When they were inside the 
death chamber they all wanted to maintain contact, they wanted me to hold their 
hand. But you can't do that because they are strapped and taped down. Instead I 
would stand right next to them and put my hand on their right leg where I could 
feel a pulse. That way, they always knew someone was with them to the very 
end."

Pickett is now an outspoken critic of capital punishment. He says:

"I know for a fact that I watched four innocent men being killed by the state 
of Texas, and many more men die who should never have been sent to the 
chamber...Of the innocent men, Carlos DeLuna was the hardest for me because I 
knew he had done nothing wrong. What was striking about him and the other 
innocent men was that they were the most peaceful at the point of their 
deaths."

During DeLuna's death, the 1st lethal injection drug failed. Pickett recalls:

"Those big, brown eyes were wide open. Here I am, 5 inches from his knee, 5 
feet from his face, and he's looking straight at me. ... And I don't know what 
the question was in his brain. I don't know what he was thinking. If I wanted 
to be paranoid, I could say he was thinking, 'You lied to me.'"

A Columbia Law report on DeLuna's death reads:

"If the 1st drug failed - and Pickett was sure it did, at least at first - then 
Carlos would be awake when the 2nd drug started suffocating him. He also would 
feel a torturous burning when the third drug entered his veins. But the 
paralysis from the 2nd drug would prevent him from showing any distress. Carlos 
would be tortured to death, but only he would know it."

(source: att.com)

*************

The Bloody Hands Of Racist Homophobic Corporatist Scalia-Defending The Murder 
Of Innocents----Scalia was personally responsible for helping to put to death 
innocent people. "Scalia was prone to pronouncements that amounted to little 
more than demagoguery. His statements contributed to decades of operation of 
the machinery of death, which took lives in brutal state-sponsored murder."


I opened a giant wooden door that separated the West Courtroom of the Fifth 
Circuit Court of Appeals from the bare hallway that connected the room to the 
fresh outside air. A small man with a patchy beard waited nervously to the 
right. He looked like a kid wanting an autograph from his favorite quarterback. 
He was a representative of the Texas Attorney General???s Office. He was 
waiting for my colleague and mentor.

We'd just finished arguments in front of a panel of the Fifth Circuit. A few 
minutes prior, my mentor had argued that we were in front of the court to talk 
about the "most egregious violation of the 6th amendment in American history." 
It was a bold claim, of course. The kind of claim that a skilled appellate 
litigator would always avoid if it wasn't true. I thought that it was. Our 
client spent 3 decades in a Texas prison without a valid conviction or 
sentence. His case had been overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals, the 
highest state criminal court in Texas. The district attorney's office that had 
once sentenced him to death had been ordered by the high court to either 
release our client or re-try him. They chose the 3rd rail, to just leave him in 
prison without doing a thing. He was a black man with a documented IQ of 
somewhere between 55 and 65. In layman's terms, that made him intellectually 
disabled or "mentally retarded."

My mentor argued that because the State failed to try our client over the three 
decades that he was in jail, the State had violated his speedy trial rights. 
The little man with the teenage beard argued that it wasn't the State's fault. 
He argued that our client, who was barely lucid enough to know how to tie his 
shoes, should somehow bring himself to trial, even though he was behind bars in 
the Texas penitentiary. The little man with the teenage beard argued, in the 
alternative, that the federal court there did not have jurisdiction to decide 
on the case at that time because of arcane procedural reasons that only very 
skilled federal appellate litigators would understand. His argument could be 
boiled down to a very simple stew - we didn't do anything wrong, and even if we 
did, you should let the State of Texas kick this case around for two more years 
before we end up back in this exact same court to answer the question of 
whether this man's speedy trial rights were violated.

It was all very civilized. Men in suits speaking into microphones that sent 
noise to men and women sitting in robes behind nice antique furniture. Others 
were there to argue cases that didn't resemble ours. Some looked up from their 
own notes when they heard my mentor speak of the gravity of the case before us.

After we'd argued, our team exchanged the usual pleasantries.

"I appreciate you flying down here to support us," my mentor said. I assured 
him that the soft poker at nearby Harrah's was as much a draw as lending my 
support to our client. We were all smiles. Then there was the little man with 
the teenage beard. He wanted to talk so badly.

My mentor acknowledged him. The little man began to speak.

"I think I worked with a professor who now works with you at the Law Center," 
he said to my mentor, referring to my alma mater in Houston.

My mentor was gracious. He's the author of books about the death penalty. He's 
secured exonerations of a handful of innocent men. He's given a speech at the 
TED conference. He's the sort of man that anyone in our field would want to 
meet and greet. He talked with the little man for a few seconds. I couldn't 
bring myself to join in the pleasantries. I commented that my mentor was twice 
the man I was for even entertaining the conversation. My mentor had already 
been through the wars. He'd been taking on Capitol Mutts for so long that 
dealing nicely with another one was as natural as a politician shaking hands at 
a rally.

I realized something in that moment. Something beyond the fact that my mentor 
was immensely better than me at work and life. I realized that the differences 
between me and the little man with the teenage beard weren't the sort of 
differences that could be bridged with a handshake and a short exchange of 
small talk.

When I stripped away all of the bullshit, he had been arguing to keep my 
mentally retarded black client in prison despite a gross violation of that 
man's civil rights. Our client had been abused by the State for decades. When 
his case was overturned by the high appellate court, it was joined by 2 cousin 
cases where those gentlemen also received outright overturns of their death 
penalty cases. 1 of those men was black. The other was white. The black man was 
re-tried by the State. He was convicted a 2nd time, and he was sentenced to 
death. He had since been executed by lethal injection, poison pumped into his 
veins until he died on the gurney like a dog. The other man, the white man, had 
his sentence properly commuted under the law. He was paroled in the 1990s, left 
to live out his years with his family. Our client had been left to rot in a 
prison cell despite a legal right to a new trial.

It wasn't a game. Our differences were not small, not political. The little man 
with the teenage beard had ostensibly spent the weeks before the oral argument 
planning creative ways to keep our client in prison a little bit longer. He'd 
been looking for ways to work around the 6th amendment rights that our client 
was due as a human. In the first few minutes I knew him, when he spoke to the 
judges of the Fifth Circuit, he'd spun himself into knots not arguing for 
mundane political advances, but for the continuance of Texas's keeping a man in 
a cage. The consequences of our sides were real. They came down right on the 
disabled head of our client.

That leads me to Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who died the day 
before Valentine's Day in 2016. In the wake of Scalia's death, opinions flowed 
over in my field. They flowed, too, from the average Joe not in my field. 
People who think like I do were just as gracious as my mentor had been to the 
little man with the teenage beard. They did that for 2 reasons. For one, 
they're better than me. Perhaps most importantly, they did so because they had 
to.

Hilary Clinton said in a statement:

"My thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Justice Scalia as 
they mourn his sudden passing," she said. "I did not hold Justice Scalia's 
views, but he was a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to 
the bench."

Bernie Sanders offered: "While I differed with Justice Scalia's views and 
jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme 
Court." California Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote:

"In his 3 decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia left a lasting 
impression on American jurisprudence. Even those of us who vigorously disagreed 
with his views recognized the power of his intellect."

Avowed death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean wrote:

"I'm very saddened to hear about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin 
Scalia. Although we didn't always agree, we were both Christians and were 
united on those essential principles. My thoughts and prayers are with Justice 
Scalia and his family."

Even President Obama offered his thoughts on the value of Scalia's "service" to 
the public. I have immense respect for the people that offered these opinions. 
I have even more respect for the pressures that made them contribute to 
needless hagiography rather than telling the truth. There's no reason to make 
margaritas in celebration of Scalia's death. Celebrated civil rights lawyer 
Clarence Darrow once said, "All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly 
dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any 
one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." His is my 
sentiment. I disagree strongly with anyone who frames differences with Scalia 
as "political" ones. It's reductionist and revisionist, reducing important 
moral imperatives down to little more than questions that could be resolved in 
many ways. The problems with Scalia were bigger than that.

The Constitution of the United States is not a legal document. The people who 
interpret it are making legal distinctions off of the document, and the people 
who argue using it are making legal arguments based upon it. But it is not a 
legal document. It's a moral document. It's a founding principle that gives 
equal rights to all men, regardless of race, religion, class or station. It's a 
document that understood how important it was to protect certain moral truths 
from the whims of politics. The Sixth Amendment exists because the founders 
recognized that a fair trial wasn't something to be left to voters, who are 
prone to getting things very wrong a few times before they get things right. 
The Fifth Amendment is there because the right of non-incrimination shouldn't 
be left to a guy who just discovered the criminal justice system when he 
stumbled upon Making a Murderer just before Christmas. That anyone believes 
they have "political" differences with Antonin Scalia is proof enough that his 
visage is worth truthful dissection.

I differed most with Scalia on the death penalty and the treatment of condemned 
people. Today, I've watched as fellow criminal defenders have posted pictures 
of the justice, and even as some lamented the harsh treatment of the justice. 
One broke down her opinions as a mere "disagreement" on ideological grounds. 
She acted as if her and Scalia agreed on the importance of educating our 
children, but disagreed on the proper way to do it. That???s a political 
disagreement. With Scalia, it's much deeper than that.

I'm friends with Anthony Graves, the 12th man ever exonerated off of death row 
in Texas, the 138th exonerated nationally. He's a black man who was sentenced 
to death for a mass child murder that he knew nothing about, only after 
prosecutors hid evidence, coerced witnesses, and manipulated the jury in the 
media. He was exonerated only after 18 years in custody. He suffered immensely, 
enduring solitary confinement, missing out on birthdays, Christmas mornings, 
and Easter egg hunts with his children. That he's now out and using his voice 
to change the world does not make up for the wrong that was done to him. My 
friend petitioned the Supreme Court to take up his case after his appeals were 
denied in state court and the lower levels of the federal system. As in most 
death penalty cases, the Supreme Court declined to take up my friend's case. 
Antonin Scalia left my friend to die. He didn't care.

And why would he? Scalia once famously declared:

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. Quite to the contrary, 
we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable 
doubt that any claim based on alleged "actual innocence" is constitutionally 
cognizable.

For the uninitiated, the justice was saying, in effect, that the constitution 
is no barrier to executing a man who is actually innocent so long as that death 
sentence has been obtained in a nominally "legal" manner. He had other death 
penalty opinions that stood out, too. In 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an 
opinion questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty. Scalia 
responded by picking out what he perceived to be the worst of worst in death 
penalty cases. He picked Henry Lee McCollum, writing that McCollum's case was a 
great example of why the death penalty was still necessary. He wrote:

"For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed 
by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal 
injection compared with that!"

McCollum walked off of death row in 2015 after DNA evidence proved his 
innocence. So much for Scalia???s model case. You see, Scalia was prone to 
pronouncements that amounted to little more than demagoguery. His statements 
contributed to decades of operation of the machinery of death, which took lives 
in brutal state-sponsored murder.

Of course he didn't stop at the death penalty. He dissented in Lawrence v. 
Texas, standing short in his belief that states should be allowed to jail gay 
people for having sex. His most recent headlines came when he suggested in an 
affirmative action case that black men might be better off at "less advanced 
schools," where they might do better.

To cloak these moral distinctions as "political differences" is disingenuous. 
It's the sort of stuff that will allow an Antonin Scalia monument to be erected 
somewhere in honor of his "passion" or "service" in the decades to come, as the 
younger public is duped into believing that his opinions were just the product 
of a different kind of legal reasoning. Since when did adjectives like 
"passionate" become a good thing without context? A man who is passionate about 
causing pain isn't one to celebrate. In fact, it would have been better if he'd 
pursued his agenda with far less passion. The "service" of a man who dedicated 
his career to marginalizing the already marginalized is not a service we should 
honor. That man would have been better off choosing a high-dollar law firm, 
where he could have marshaled his considerable legal skills in favor of money 
before running himself into the ground.

Death does not wash away the stench of planned cruelty. Scalia holds more moral 
responsibility for his decisions than the average villain. His weren't 
in-the-moment mistakes made under pressure. They were calculated judgments made 
after hours, days, and weeks of reflection. They were opinions written with the 
greatest of care.

To reduce these opinions, and these differences to the unmoving label of 
"political" does a disservice to the pain his decisions brought to actual human 
beings. Like the little man with the teenage beard, Scalia's actions weren't 
without a victim. When he wrote of the death penalty, he directly weighed on my 
friend Anthony and plenty of others, too. When he ruled in Lawrence, he laid 
the groundwork for much of the hate that's made assaults on gay men and women a 
thing that we must tackle in 2016. If you call these political differences, as 
if they're just different methods of solving a problem, you demonstrate a 
stunning lack of understanding that when Antonin Scalia spoke and wrote, his 
words carried unique power that often led to death, added to prejudice, and 
threatened to set America back a hundred years.

(source: grizzard; indybay.org)