What’s going on here?

On the lighter side, since we can’t talk about the early stages of the second American Civil War in every post, for those of you who are prone to make some dumbass “sportsball?” response, Scott mentioned yesterday that the new MLB ABS replay system seems to be going great, as illustrated by the fact that the overturning of a couple of bad balls and strikes calls by CB Bucknor got the loudest cheers at the Reds game. I’m wondering whether that circumstance had anything to do with this the following night:

This is a really bizarre one from CB, who appears to be angling to get fired or something equally weird. He calls the batter out for missing first base, when:

(a) That basically never happens; and

(b) It didn’t even come close to happening here — he stepped on the middle of the bag; and

(c) Bucknor wasn’t even looking at the play when he made the call.

Bucknor then stands there with an unmistakably smug look on his face, waiting for the replay system to overturn this completely inexplicable call.

I suspect a bunch of old umpires who have spent their whole careers exercising unreviewable discretion, while using the strike zone as the basis for creative self-expression, are going to be driven into retirement by the baseball equivalent of DNA evidence.

Near the beginning of my tenure as a law professor more than 30 years ago now, I was involved in a debate with the then-district attorney for Denver, who assured me that he was absolutely certain that his office had never secured a wrongful conviction. It’s hard to imagine today, but at the time similar statements were made routinely by all sorts of bigwigs throughout the legal system. It was only about 20 years ago when Scalia pontificated in some SCOTUS opinion that nobody had ever proven that an innocent person had ever been executed by the American legal system, in a quote I’m too aggravated to look up at the moment.

We need ABS for Supreme Court justices, among other things.

. . . Lemieux, J., exhumed the relevant case:

 It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby. 

This by the way was written two years after the without question innocent of a crime that never actually happened Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas, after a bunch of right wing assholes like Scalia refused to even read a report by an actual expert that completely exonerated Willingham before they legally murdered him.