Judges cite vivid but false crime narratives to justify executions

Evidence

In his dispute with Justice Blackmun on the justness of capital punishment, Justice Scalia cited a murder committed 30 years earlier: “For example, the case of the 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 to that!” (Mazza, 2014). Two brothers of low intelligence were sentenced to death for this crime on the basis of a coerced, fake confession that they later retracted, rather than on physical evidence linking them to the crime. Justice Scalia used this case as an example of the justness and comparative benignness of the death penalty. In an ironic twist, the same case later became an example of judicial injustice. After 30 years of imprisonment, the brothers were exonerated by DNA evidence from the crime scene that linked the murder to a sex offender imprisoned later for another rape (Mazza, 2014). Periodic DNA exonerations indicate that there are other innocents on death row. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2077

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does Scalia’s graphic hypothetical function as a disengagement device — focusing on the offender’s moral repulsiveness to silence doubt about institutional error? This is worth chasing as it parallels Bandura’s mechanism of dehumanizing the victim to justify harm.
• SEED: Angle: how vivid single-case outrage functions as moral disengagement in elites who otherwise claim principled frameworks — Scalia’s gut-described murder vs. his ‘gobbledygook’ dismissal of systemic analysis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2077
• XREF: connects to: Racial framing decides which killers get mythologized versus executed by police — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1751; Capital convictions are frequently reversed before an execution occurs — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2049