A man on death row for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl was freed by a judge this week after DNA evidence implicated another man in the case.
The man, Henry Lee McCollum, was described by Justice Antonin Scalia in 1994 as an example of why the death penalty was justified.
That year, the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Scalia and Justice Harry Blackmun wrote rivaling dissenting opinions in Callins v. Collins stating their strong beliefs for and against the death penalty, respectively.
The “death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection,” Scalia wrote, “looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, 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 with that!”
The convictions of McCollum and his half brother, Leon Brown, who was serving a life sentence, were vacated on Tuesday by a superior court judge in North Carolina. The New York Times reported that the two men, both African-Americans, were booked in 1983 despite physical evidence; McCollum eventually said he and his half brother gave false confessions after being coerced and threatened by the authorities, disavowing them during the trial.
The chilling episode serves as a cautionary tale in the ongoing legal debate about whether the death penalty counts as cruel and unusual punishment.
Blackmun retired from the Court months after the Callins order; Scalia remains a strong supporter of the constitutionality of the death penalty.
