My argument with Justice Antonin Scalia (Opinion) - CNN.com

My argument with Justice Antonin Scalia (Opinion) - CNN.com: In "Innocents," I wrote about two men I believe were innocent: Joseph O'Dell and Dobie Gillis Williams, whose executions Scalia summarily authorized without an apparent qualm, acknowledging that his role on the Supreme Court made him part of the "machinery of death."

Scalia's experience of the "meaning" of capital punishment, as he described it in one of his dissenting opinions, couldn't have been more different from my own. In the marble confines of the court, he argued interpretation of Constitutional texts, while I, in state killing chambers, accompanied real human beings -- six of them -- to their deaths, which were a direct result of Scalia's interpretations.

 

In grasping the "meaning" of state killings, I had one advantage over Scalia. I was there, close up to the anguish and terror of the condemned and their grieving mothers. Scalia, in the cerebral confines of the Court, never touched a tear-stained cheek, never stood present at the grave as families buried their loved ones killed by the state.

 

One thing the justice and I did have in common, however, was this: he stumped around the country to persuade citizens of the rightness of his "originalist" approach to the Constitution; I stumped around the country (still do) to persuade citizens to abolish the death penalty, laying out my arguments through stories of personal experience, beliefs of my Catholic faith and logical, fact-infused arguments, including Constitutional analysis.

 

After all, as citizens, are we not the ultimate proprietors of the Constitution and its meaning for our lives? Are not its protections of life and liberty far too precious to blindly be turned over to legal "experts," every bit as prone to prejudice and blind spots as the rest of us?