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My second thought to transcribing it from DVR was, "someone likely beat me to
it". http://www.ideas-issues.com/2008/04/alan-shore-v-su.html
Shore: May it please the court, Mr. Chief Justice. Currently, there are
three thousand, three hundred people on death row in this country. My client is
one of only two who did not commit murder.
Scalia: You here to give us a box score?
Shore: I'd like to provide a context, your Honor. In Louisiana, a hundred
eighty men have been prosecuted for child rape since this law went into effect
in 1995. Leonard Serra is the only one facing death.
Scalia: Look, Counsel, Louisiana law permits death for child rape.
Shore: And I would respectfully submit that law is unconstitutional.
Scalia: Based on what?
Shore: Based on this court's finding in Coker that the death penalty --
Scalia: That spoke to the rape of an adult, not a child. Maybe you need to
read it again.
Shore: (silent)
Scalia: And even if I were to concede your point -- which I don't -- there's
a national consensus now in favor of authorizing the death penalty for
non-homicide rape.
Shore: Why? Because Louisiana passed a barbaric law, joining the ranks of
Saudi Arabia, Uganda, China--
Scalia: And other states in this country!
Shore: Five. Five states, that's hardly a consensus. And none of those other
states authorize death for first time offenders as Louisiana does. And it should
also be noted in your reliance on a "national consensus," you look to trends in
legislation, laws passed by politicians, mostly around election time when
they're desperate to appear "tough on crime." The people who care the most
about the welfare of children -- doctors and social workers, people who
actually treat abused kids -- have filed amicus briefs asking you to strike
down this law. Because they know that the death penalty in fact does not
protect kids at all, but rather it makes it LESS likely that children, even if
they've been abused, will report the crime, especially if a family member is
involved. No kid wants to be responsible for a relative being executed. And
children often get it wrong. They are uniquely prone to suggestibility and
coercion -- not that the police would ever be guilty of that, of course. But we
already have an epidemic of wrongful convictions in this country, as many as
fifteen thousand a year, too many of them ending up on death row. And child
rape prosecutions are especially unreliable. And now we want to add the death
penalty to make these mistakes irrevocable? Whatever one's feelings are on
capital punishment -- and I realize with this court, one seems to be for it --
you simply cannot ignore the fact that we often screw it up. We convict the
innocent, we botch executions. Which is why many states have declared a
moratorium on capital punishment. That's your true national consensus. And yet
here comes Louisiana, seeking to expand the death penalty to non-homicide
cases. And this is my favorite part -- to kill the mentally disabled! Are we
serious?
Justice: This defendant was never officially pronounced disabled.
Shore: But he is, just the same, your Honor. He has an IQ of seventy.
They're going to kill him because there was no official pronouncement?
Alito: The way this goes, Counsel, is we work off a record which you are not
free to amend.
Shore: But by record you simply mean the conviction. Reading of the entire
record shows that he denies his guilt and always has, he has no prior arrests,
that the victim never even made the accusation until a full twenty months after
the alleged crime, there was no DNA--
Justice: Actual innocence is not something you get to argue!
Shore: Well how silly is that? You're deciding whether or not to kill
someone, and his possible innocence is irrelevant?
Roberts: Mr Shore! I don't like your demeanor, your tone. And I would remind
you of where you are.
Shore: I know exactly where I am, Mr. Chief Justice. I'm in the Supreme
Court of the United States and let me tell you, you folks aren't as hot as all
get out.
Carl: Dear God.
Shore: Let's consider your respective Senate confirmations. You all
testified under oath that you'd never actually considered how you would rule on
abortion. You must be kidding. Never gave it a thought. No perjury there?
Justice Scalia, you went duck hunting with Vice President Cheney while he was a
named defendant in a case before this court. Congratulations on not getting
shot, by the way, but you didn't exactly avoid the appearance of impropriety
there. Justice Alito, you were caught hearing a case involving a company you'd
invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in. Huh, no conflict of interest
there? You also don't recuse yourself in terrorism cases, even though your best
friend is Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security. Seems to me that the
Supreme Court of the United States should be made of sterner stuff. Am I right?
Justice Thomas, at least put down the magazine.
Thomas: Hey!
Roberts: I really don't think you mean to come after us, Counsel.
Shore: Oh but I do. In your short term as Chief Justice, this Court, with
your narrow majority, has turned back the clock on civil rights, school
segregation, equal protection, free speech, abortion, campaign finance --
you've been overtly and shamelessly pro-business, making it impossible for some
plaintiffs to so much as sue corporations, especially Big Oil and Big Tobacco.
Somebody's got to go after you. Exxon-Mobil made over forty billion dollars in
2007. Forty BILLION. And yet, nineteen years after the Valdez oil spill,
plaintiffs are still waiting to be fully compensated. Justice Scalia, you want
to overturn the verdict altogether, because it's not the company's fault that
the ship's captain got drunk? But he was a drunk and they knew it. Perhaps not
the best choice to pilot fifty-three million gallons of crude oil through an
environmentally sensitive area --
Justice: You are getting so far off point --
Shore: My point is: who are you people? You've transformed this court from
being a governmental branch devoted to civil rights & liberties, into a
protector of discrimination, a guardian of government, a slave to monied
interests and big business and today -- Hallelujah! -- you seek to kill a
mentally disabled man. I'm curious -- as a group, how many executions have you
all actually witnessed?
Court: (silence)
Shore: I'm sorry . . . . that's unfair . . . . I've seen five. And it is the
most inhumane, cruel and unusual hypocrisy of a system that promises to be just.
Scalia: I'll ask you to leave your personal politics out of this.
Shore: And I'd ask you to do exactly the same. The Supreme Court was
intended to be free and unadulterated by politics. It is now dominated by it.
You're hand-picked by Presidents with ideological agendas. And of the two dozen
five-four decisions in your 2006-2007 term, nineteen broke straight across
ideological lines -- that's politics. And while you claim to be against
judicial activism, you rewrote -- uh, check that -- you INVENTED new law to
decide a presidential election, for God's sake! If that's the way it's going to
be, then at least have the decency to put your names on ballots like the rest of
the politicians, so that we the people get a voice.
Roberts: Mr. Shore! You have said quite enough. Now you might consider using
what little time you have remaining to represent your client instead of your own
left-wing agenda.
Shore: Yes. I absolutely cannot stand up here and ask anybody to excuse the
rape of a child. If it were my child, I'd want to shoot the son of a bitch in
front of the courthouse. But the more evolved response would be to take into
account all the circumstances, and to deliberate, and decide, whether Leonard
Serra truly represents the worst of the worst of humanity, for whom we reserve
the death penalty.
I've been advised by my advisors not to talk about Leonard. But I am going
to talk about him. Because Leonard Serra is not in any way the worst. Leonard
is not a son of a bitch. Emotionally, intellectually, he is a child. Is this
really the person to make an example of? Of all the men Louisiana has
prosecuted for child rape since the passage of this law, only Leonard has been
sentenced to death. Does it strike any of you as fair that the one guy singled
out is a guy with an IQ of seventy? Really?
Leonard Serra's black. In Louisiana, historically, it's been blacks that
have been executed for rape in non-homicide cases. In the last hundred years,
Louisiana has executed twenty-nine men for rape. All were black. On the face of
this building it reads, "Equal justice under law." I would beg you to honor
that.
Finally, I'd like to say, that despite my tone, I have always been, and
still am, in enormous awe of this institution. Elected officials represent the
will of the American people. But the Supreme Court has always reflected our
soul, and our conscience . . . MY conscience, and I hope yours. I simply cannot
reconcile executing a mentally disabled man, whether he was officially
pronounced as such or not. We have to be better than that. Even if Louisiana
isn't. You know, on the back of this building is that magnificent sculpture,
part of which symbolizes the concept of justice, tempered by . . . mercy. If
mercy truly lives within these walls, within your hearts -- as Justices, as
people, you cannot cause this man to be injected with chemicals for the purpose
of killing him, for a crime it's very possible he did not commit. He asked me to
tell you that, that he did not commit it. He felt it was important that you know
that. He also asked me to tell you he doesn't want to die.
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com> wrote: