Updated 12.01.2022 AM: Justice Brown-Jackson signed a very cogent dissent (joined by Justice Sotomayor) to the killing of Mr. Johnson. It is here, in full -- and a bit now:
. . .[T]he [Mizzou] court’s determination that there was not “clear and convincing” evidence to support the motion to vacate in the absence of a hearing in which there would have been a chance to produce such evidence, as the statute requires, transgressed core procedural due process principles. See Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U. S. 778, 786 (1973) (noting that the “‘minimum requirements of due process’” include an “‘opportunity to be heard in person and to present witnesses and documentary evidence’”). Indeed, it is unclear how the Missouri Supreme Court could have validly determined whether there was “clear and convincing evidence” of a constitutional error when the mandatory hearing at which evidence relevant to that determination would have been presented did not occur. . . .
It is also noteworthy that Johnson’s prior and unsuccessful assertion of claims concerning selective prosecution and Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986), did not preclude the invocation of §547.031 and Johnson’s corresponding federal due process claim, notwithstanding the Missouri Supreme Court’s contrary suggestion. See Order 11–12, 16, 19. If the required hearing had been held, someone might have pointed out that §547.031 itself “permits a prosecuting attorney to present all evidence relevant to such claims, regardless of whether the defendant is procedurally defaulted from raising such claims.” Id., at 8 (Breckenridge, J., dissenting). In any event, it appears that much of the evidence that could have been presented at the nonexistent hearing was new evidence relating to the trial prosecutor’s racially biased practices and racially insensitive remarks. And now that evidence will not be considered on the merits by any court, much less the one that was supposed to base its conclusions about the validity of Johnson’s conviction on all such evidence, per the statutory mandate. For all of these reasons, I would have granted the stay. . . .
End update.
The Supremes' radical racist whyte right wing is in full-on high dungeon, this Holiday Season.
Both KBJ and Sotomayor would have spared this Black man in Missouri (one other justice had to recuse, due to prior involvements), given the weight of the evidence that this prosecutor selected people for death -- based largely on the color of their skin. This whole notion violates the Eighth's "no cruel and unusual" punishments -- and obviously so, under prior Supremes' decisions:
. . .[T]he selective prosecution claim proffers evidence that McCulloch treated African-Americans who killed white police officers differently from a white defendant who killed such an officer. And the difference was not just the fact that McCulloch sought death against all four African-Americans who had killed white police officers but not against the one white defendant who had done so.
It was also the fact that McCulloch gave the white defendant (Forster) the opportunity to present mitigating evidence to McCulloch in order to persuade him not to seek death -- an opportunity he never afforded to any of the four similarly situated African-American defendants. These facts set out a claim for selective prosecution under United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996). . . .
In sum, more than a few whyte murderers live on in Missouri, while brown and black ones... are put to death, by prior official prosecutorial "targeting". That is what a court-appointed commission found, in abundant on the record evidence. But the six still rushed ahead to kill this man.
Yes, he committed the murder -- but he was entitled to be treated the same way a whyte murderer was (including a right to present mitigating evidence). That plainly did not happen. But he is dead already. So that discussion won't ever be had.
नमस्ते
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