Shed no tears for Antonin Scalia: Let us not praise the man who gave us Citizens United and Bush...

Antonin Scalia was one of the most profoundly dishonest men in the history of American public life. He made Richard Nixon seem almost quaint by comparison. But that’s not the impression being broadcast to the world today.

Scalia’s death has let forth an elite love fest of such remarkable intensity, you’d think he was war criminal Henry Kissinger. The love—on MSNBC as much as anywhere—came almost as fast as the GOP determination not to allow Obama to appoint his successor. Folks might disagree with what he had to say from the bench, but hey! He was such a nice guy! Best buds with Notorious RBG! How could you say anything mean about him?

Maybe if you weren’t an elite lawyer, or media commentator, but rather someone to had suffer as a result of his bigoted cruelty? Maybe then you’d see things a bit differently, if you were someone close to Leonel Herrera, or Anthony Davis. Who are those men, you say? Two men facing execution with credible claims of actual innocence, that’s who.

If the law does not protect the innocent, then it’s hard to conceive what the law is for. Yet, Scalia—so deeply devoted to the rule of law—repeatedly held that it did not. In his 1993 concurrence in Herrera v. Collins he wrote:

There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.

Sixteen years later, in the case of Anthony Davis, after seven key eyewitnesses recanted their testimony, some fingering a man who testified against Davis, Scalia wrote:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent."