James Dean Walker v. A.L. Lockhart, Superintendent of the Arkansas Department of Corrections

Some of the arguments made in the dissenting opinion deserve, in my view, a brief comment.

1. The statement is made that “[t]he Court today frees James Dean Walker ____” Post, at 962. That is not at all what the Court is doing. We are simply holding that fundamental fairness, embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, requires a new trial. If Walker is ultimately freed, it will only be because he is acquitted by a jury, assuming that the state does not drop the matter on its own motion, which seems most unlikely.

2. I yield to no one in my conviction that the…