Eideard

A mortally wounded man’s identification of his assailant may be repeated by police officers in court, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The 6-to-2 decision was a significant retreat from the court’s recent embrace of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, which guarantees criminal defendants the right to confront witnesses against them.

Justice Antonin Scalia had been the leading proponent of a robust interpretation of the Confrontation Clause, and Monday’s decision drew a slashing dissent from him. He called the majority’s account of the facts of the case “so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution…”

Justice Sotomayor, responding to criticism from Justice Scalia, acknowledged that determining whether the primary purpose of a crime victim’s statement was to provide information about past events or to aid in addressing a current emergency requires “a highly context-dependent inquiry…”

Justice Scalia’s dissent was comprehensively critical of the majority’s approach. He said it represented a significant shift away from the court’s 2004 ruling in Crawford v. Washington, which had breathed new life into the Confrontation Clause…

Justice Scalia added that the majority had smuggled back into the law a factor that the Crawford decision had rejected — whether the out-of-court statements were “reliable.”

“Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty,” Justice Scalia wrote for the majority in Crawford. “This is not what the Sixth Amendment prescribes.”

An essentially Republican court renders an essentially conservative opinion. One that reeks of frontier justice and the laws of Judge Lynch.

With no right to confront and question a witness defendants lose a basic constitutional right.

US Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) is taking heat today for calling US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia a homophobe during an interview with 365gay.com. When discussing gay marriage, Frank said he believed the issue would eventually make its way to the US Supreme Court, but said he wouldn’t want it to go there now because “that homophobe Antonin Scalia has got too many votes on this current court.”

Now, some of you may disagree and follow the reasoning that Scalia isn’t anti-gay, just anti-progressive. He’s a firm believer that the US Constitution is not a living document and it should be strictly construed as written in 1781 because, well, things just haven’t really changed that much since then, have they? And of course, everyone knows there were no gay people until the mid-20th century, around the same time those pesky blacks wanted their right to eat at the same table as whites.

If you really want proof that Scalia is a homophobe, all you have to do is read his scathing dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the seminal 2003 case that struck down sodomy laws and affirmed gay citizens’ right to privacy denied to us by the hateful 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick. In Lawrence, Scalia compared homosexuality to bigamy, incest, prostitution, and bestiality. He also said homosexuality was contagious and that teachers could induce their students to become gay. He accused the Court of “signing on to the so-called homosexual agenda”. Scalia has said publicly that he considers being gay an “immoral lifestyle choice”.

I guess it’s a measure of progress that American bigots get upset nowadays if they’re identified as bigots. The United States has no more racism, no misogyny, no homophobes, no xenophobia.

In your dreams.