There isn't "a single case - not one - in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

Question

While reading about recent evidence that casts strong doubt on whether Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004, was actually guilty I ran across the following statement in the Washington Post, quoting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

As the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in Kansas in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the opposition could not cite “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

_{Excerpt from a Washington post article}

I was rather surprised to read this, my impression from various news articles was that there are multiple cases where it is pretty clear that an innocent was executed.

Are there no cases where it has been clearly shown that an innocent was executed in the United States?

Answer 1

When approaching this question there are two items that need to be resolved, if the quote accurately quotes what Justice Antonin Scalia said and the second of which if the quote in its current context is true.

With regards to wrongful executions in the United States, Wikipedia provides several well referenced examples of cases where serious doubt was raised after the execution and Samuel Gross provides another good summary from a legal perspective; however, in the case of Jesse Tafero (October 12, 1946 – May 4, 1990), was convicted of murder and executed via electric chair in the state of Florida. Walter Rhodes, later confessed to the shooting after Tafero's execution. Which discredits Justice Scalia's assertion of a single case.

However, is that exactly what Justice Scalia said? It turns out that this quote is from the Kansas v. Marsh case of the exact quote from his concurring opinion was,

It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss 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 by the abolition lobby. The dissent makes much of the new-found capacity of DNA testing to establish innocence. But in every case of an executed defendant of which I am aware, that technology has confirmed guilt.

Since the ruling was decided in 2006 and the Tafero case occurred in 1990 the question of if a gap sixteen years makes a case recent or not is best left to the reader.

Answer 2

I just want to add a very recent article in the Guardian

... it would be unwise to assume that everyone condemned to death is guilty of a terrible crime: a new report from the Marshall Project explains how, only a decade ago, Texas executed a man who was almost certainly innocent – and did so in a way that makes it enormously unlikely that he was the only innocent man to die in the state’s high-volume execution chambers.

and raise the question: What means "clearly shown" with respect to "evidence"?

"Clear" is a relative term - clear for whom or from what kind of view - and furthermore is there no and can never be a status of absolute clearness! We live in a continuous world, where is always uncertainty involved - no matter what you do. Therefore, to apply such a black-and-white term, you can just reduce that uncertainty (in the eyes of the subject) to a level where the subject perceives something as clear based on his reality.

It is unclear to me what the subject involved here is. Is it clear in the eyes of

• the commonality (in the sense of more than half of the statistical mean of the population - the average citizen)?
• the average politician high enough to speak in the name of the government (yes, I do distinct here)?
• the judge?
• the jury?

I tend to believe that subject here is the judge but I also perceive it as a polemic.