Cite as: 505 U. S. 333 (1992)
Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment
onstrated that state officials deliberately had elicited inculpa-tory admissions from him in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights and had withheld information he needed to present his claim for relief. In addition, McCleskey argued convincingly in his final hours that he could not even obtain an impartial clemency hearing because of threats by state officials against the pardons and parole board. That the Court permitted McCleskey to be executed without ever hearing the merits of his claims starkly reveals the Court's skewed value system, in which finality of judgments, conservation of state resources, and expediency of executions seem to receive greater solicitude than justice and human life. See McCleskey v. Bowers, 501 U. S. 1281 (1991) (Marshall, J., dissenting from denial of stay of execution).
The execution of Roger Keith Coleman is no less an affront to principles of fundamental fairness. Last Term, the Court refused to review the merits of Coleman's claims by effectively overruling, at Coleman's expense, precedents holding that state-court decisions are presumed to be based on the merits (and therefore, are subject to federal habeas review) unless they explicitly reveal that they were based on state procedural grounds. See Coleman, 501 U. S., at 762-764 (dissenting opinion). Moreover, the Court's refusal last month to grant a temporary stay of execution so that the lower courts could conduct a hearing into Coleman's well-supported claim that he was innocent of the underlying offense demonstrates the resounding hollowness of the Court's professed commitment to employ the "fundamental miscarriage of justice exception" as a "safeguard against compelling an innocent man to suffer an unconstitutional loss of liberty." McCleskey v. Zant, 499 U. S., at 495 (internal quotation marks omitted). See Coleman v. Thompson, 504 U. S. 188, 189 (1992) (opinion dissenting from denial of stay of execution).
As I review the state of this Court's capital jurisprudence, I thus am left to wonder how the ever-shrinking authority of
359
Page: Index Previous 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007