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Mistweeting Justice Scalia

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Chris Schmidt has this post at ISCOTUS now, the moral of which is, "Tweets are a lousy way to get our coverage of public events."

Jennifer Pignolet of the Memphis Commercial Appeal tweeted live during a speech by Justice Scalia, "Ta[l]king now about the death penalty. Says he now has 4 colleagues who believe it's unconstitutional. He disagrees."  (Emphasis added.)  Just one small problem.  The "now" and the present-tense verb were completely wrong.  Schmidt reports,

Scalia did not say that four of his current colleagues are ready to strike down the death penalty.  What he said, as Pignolet of the Commercial Appeal reported in a follow-up article, was the following: "I sat with three colleagues who thought the death penalty is unconstitutional ... I sat with three colleagues, and there is now a fourth -- Justice Breyer has announced that he thinks the death penalty is unconstitutional."  This quotation clearly indicates that Scalia was looking backwards in time, to colleagues he sat with, not to his colleagues on the current Court.  He was not talking about Sotomayor or Kagan or Kennedy.  He was talking about William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun, each of whom denounced the death penalty as unconstitutional while sitting on the Court.  In talking about his four anti-death penalty colleagues, Scalia was not saying anything we didn't already know.

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