If you sit through any ads today online, sit through Salon's so you can read this excellent Dave Lindorff piece about the breakdown in the US capital punishment system. It's not so much about guilt and innocence all the time as it is sentencing: people who, by law, should not be executed for their crimes are being executed.

We've been here before on this blog (as in Ryan does right and Can we impeach Scalia now?), but the issues continue to raise. In that latter story, I looked at Ring v. Arizona, where Scalia would have to choose between his allegedly-founding belief that only juries are triers of fact, vs. his love of executions in a case where a judge imposed the death penalty instead of a jury. As it turned out, Scalia did vote in favor of plaintiff Ring and said the death penalty imposed by a judge was unconstitutional. In a concurring opinion, the ideologue made it clear that it was a tough choice for him, and that he thought judges could still sentence people to death by themselves, but only if a jury had found the aggravating facts allowing that to be true:

What today's decision says is that the jury must find the existence of the fact that an aggravating factor existed. Those States that leave the ultimate life-or-death decision to the judge may continue to do so - by requiring a prior jury finding of aggravating factor in the sentencing phase or, more simply, by placing the aggravating-factor determination (where it logically belongs anyway) in the guilt phase.

Although initial reports said Ring was retroactive, it turns out that's not what the Supremes said, and lower courts now must decide if people sentenced under laws like the one overturned in Ring should be resentenced. The Arizona Supreme Court, predictably but sadly, has already ruled no, under many of the conditions that Lindorff talks about in today's article: the courts are continuing to treat the death penalty like a game and saying that if you didn't find out you were illegally sentenced within a couple of years of it happening, you don't have any right to appeal even when it becomes clear later that your execution would be illegal under current law. Prosecutors can ask for it to be overturned at any time "in the interests of justice." Defendants, even those who have new factual evidence of innocence, cannot.

It's an important story for everyone who believes that justice should be applied consistently and without favor to those with resources, which should be a synonym for "everyone."