Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been "a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Apparently, that innocent person's name is Cameron Todd Willingham.

Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

I wrote previously that:

I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong.

In 2003 I recommended an interesting web site:

Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas.

Sure enough, this site is still in operation, and today, Cameron Todd Willingham's Information Sheet and Last Statement are there, although the Statement is incomplete because the government omitted part of it "due to profanity."

No shit?

Click through for Noteworthy's post, and then through again for the article.

Executing innocent people