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Occam’s Razor and Scalia Conspiracy Theories
Justice Scalia’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday, but the man was hardly declared dead before conspiracy theories started circulating to the effect that he was assassinated. There’s no point in addressing specific claims because we’re still in the innuendo stage. But more importantly, any hint of a conspiracy collapses with the slightest application of skepticism.
In order for any assassination conspiracy to work, the first question is “Cui bono?“ Who benefits? Who would go to the trouble of murdering a Supreme Court justice? When you’re playing the election-year conspiracy innuendo game, there’s only two choices: red team or blue.
What would be the point of a Republican conspiracy to murder Justice Scalia? The only suggestion I’ve heard is that it would be a rallying point for Republicans. They must, must, must win the White House back to be able to pick a replacement Supreme Court justice.
This runs headlong into two problems: Barack Obama is still President. So he gets to nominate a replacement. But supposing Senate Republicans can block an appointment for an entire year (which necessitates enormous fortitude on the part of Senate Republicans), that still requires (1) a Republican to be elected in November, and (2) the new President to nominate a conservative justice to replace Scalia. Even then, why kill a man hailed as a conservative legal hero to risk another David Souter? There’s just too much chaos, too much that can go wrong with that plan.
Ah, but what about the Democrats? If they assassinated Scalia, Obama would get to make the appointment. It would be a rallying point for Democrats, who must, must, must win the White House to appoint a progressive hero to the Court. After all, those people are capable of anything, aren’t they?
Yes, Obama would get to nominate a replacement. But there’s a better-than-even chance the Republicans will block any Supreme Court appointment. As a rallying point, it would be slightly bigger for Republicans. Conservatives control the Court, so they have more to lose. And if you’re going to go so far as to murder a Supreme Court justice, why do it now? Why not do it in 2009 before Citizens United was decided? Or in 2014 before Burwell was decided? (Or any other major case that could go the other way.) Of all times, why now, when it would guarantee a very bloody and chaotic nomination fight?
We are bound to hear these conspiracy theories. We’re already seeing the beginnings of it. These people said this. What about that. Those theories will continue to build, because like any death, there will be unanswered questions. Conspiracy theorists will engage in anomaly-hunting and exploit any unknown to generate innuendo.
No doubt, some Republican candidates will play the innuendo game (or outright conspiracy monger), just like Democrats did with 9/11 while George W. Bush was President, only to forget their pet conspiracy theories after their team gets back the White House. Shame on Republicans who do. They should know better. (Well, most of them anyway.)
What really damns any and all Scalia conspiracy theories is Occam’s Razor, the principle that the hypothesis that contains the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct. So to anyone who thinks Justice Scalia may have been murdered, I ask ask this: Which is more likely? That a 79-year-old man with multiple health problems, who complained of discomfort before going to bed, died in his sleep? Or that a complex conspiracy killed him at a nonsensical time to create an uncertain outcome?
Published in General
Gentlemen,
Most of what you are saying is a non-sequitur. Yes, the law in Texas allowed Scalia to be declared dead by phone without so much as an observation by either police or a physician. Yes, the family has objected to an autopsy. Yes, because of this there is little that can be done at this point short of starting conspiracy theories as inane as Fred’s straw men.
However, this means that reasonable people will always have a small doubt about this. That may be what we will be forced to live with but Occam would be appalled by your usurpation of a perfectly good dictum.
Regards,
Jim
Was the report of a pillow over his face a fact not worthy of suspicion for autopsy?
Why not?
If your answer is in the negative, apply your standard of review to a husband calling the police and saying, “I got home from work and my wife was dead with a pillow over her face. I’m a sheriff’s officer so I know it was a heart attack. And I demand no autopsy.”
As I said in an earlier comment procedure is important- not always for the case you are thinking about- but for the case you aren’t thinking about.
Because there is a difference between “having a pillow over your face” and “being smothered.” (And you wouldn’t need an autopsy to figure it out -smothering would leave marks on the skin, and is hard to do with a pillow, so Scalia would have woken up and resisted.) I sleep with a pillow over my eyes and ears. Megan McCardle does it. It was apparently a well known behavior in Scalia.
Big Oil did it. Didn’t anyone see The Pelican Brief?
Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
Also, the movie combines being a terrible mystery with being very explicit left-wing agitprop, so I have saved you two hours of your life.
You’re welcome.
Sabr,
I would review the known facts this way. First, he was with many people at dinner. He exhibited no distress at all. He was in fine spirits as reported by numerous witnesses. Second, he went back to his room and without removing his clothes lay down on top of the blankets. Death occurred at some time after this. It did not involve anything like a struggle. He was not found until past noon the next day. Normally, a relative or assistant would have been with him (in this case his son was to be there but couldn’t make it) so only the owner of the resort realized he hadn’t come out of his room.
I am anything but a forensic MD. However, it is obvious to me that the possibility of a poison would not be ruled out. This implies neither that it happened or any particular elaborate conspiracy. This ordinary doubt would have been nearly completely ruled out by a slightly more rigorous investigation. For public figures of this magnitude, one might expect such an investigation.
What it is, is what it is.
Regards,
Jim
My father was 75 with a long history of heart disease, plus Type 2 diabetes. When he died suddenly at home the police took his body to the coroner for an autopsy (I do not believe it was a full autopsy but they did do toxicology). We all thought this was unnecessary and my poor mother felt like she was being looked at as a suspect or something. That was Massachusetts and I assume it was standard procedure, although it seemed like a waste to me.
Vance,
I am very sorry to hear of this insensitivity. When my father died of a stroke my mother who had been giving him a regular dose of aspirin was extremely upset. She thought that she may have missed a day that week. Of course, the aspirin was no cure only a mild palliative against the possibility of stroke. She had doggedly held out and worked to prevent anything happening to him till the end. I very carefully told her that she had done nothing wrong but in fact everything right. I think she believed me and did not fall into a terrible depression.
Scalia was an extremely significant Supreme Court Justice. This is a public figure that the public has a great and very real interest in. I can not demand of the family what they do not wish to give. However, reasonable people will still have reasonable doubt. A toxicological investigation probably would show nothing. That’s the point. We could forget the doubt with this nothing.
Regards,
Jim
My grandmother was nearly 101 when she died — of heart failure, and it was long expected. She was at home, surrounded by her family, in Washington DC. Her doctor had told us that when she passed, which would be soon, we should call 911 to let them know we needed a coroner. So after we shut her eyes and said goodbye, we did.
The homicide squad came over.
We had no idea that DC police are required to presume that every death outside of a hospital is a homicide. They weren’t at all rude; they were very nice. Obviously, they understood pretty quickly that this wasn’t a homicide. But we were really shocked. My father had just lost his mother. I’d just lost my grandmother. And the homicide squad shows up? Not being immortal is somehow suspicious?
She died at home according to her longstanding, clearly expressed desire, and according to the explicit directive of her living will. She wanted to die peacefully in her own home. And she did. At the age of 100.
While obviously it wasn’t a huge deal in the big scheme of things — we were more preoccupied about losing my grandmother — I do think there’s little the government could do to make a death in the family more painful. No matter how old someone is, you do always ask yourself — was there something more I could have done? Did we do the right thing? You’d think in a country where we send grief counselors to the scene of every sprained ankle to make the healing process begin, it would occur to people: Sending the cops to intimate that the bereaved just bumped granny off is not sensitive.
The night of my grandfather’s death he was with us at dinner. He exhibited no distress at all and was in good spirits. He died sitting upright in a recliner with the remote still on the armrest. I found him the next morning around 10 heading out the door to baseball practice.
But here’s the thing. The TV wasn’t on. Why would he still have the remote and be sitting in the chair with the TV off?
Sure, my grandad wasn’t a Supreme Court Justice, but Scalia’s role is the only reason for any suspicion given the circumstances. Once an assumption of foul play is introduced, innocent facts become evidence of conspiracy.
Poison doesn’t work that way. Any poison strong enough to kill with one massive dose would also be impossible to hide in the food, any poison weak enough to pass undetected in food would require multiple doses. Any poison strong enough to kill and induced by ways other than food would leave visible marks on the body (needle marks, inflamation at the injection point) -not to mention that the body’s own response to the poison would, again, be obvious. Blood, mucus, vomit.
These are reasonable concerns for people who read too many bad mystery novels.
Scalia was 79. Had a history of heart problems (bad enough his doctor didn’t want to do a routine shoulder surgery). We went to sleep and didn’t wake up. There’s no evidence of foul play -the pillow has been dealt with above and the poison concern is ludicrous.
It happened to a friend of mine, about a year after he graduated college. Was on a sales trip, and died in his sleep in a hotel room. No drugs, but a previously undiagnosed heart issue. He was 24, and married only about 6 months.
Okay, here we go. The pillow thing comes from ranch owner John Poindexter, who said that Scalia had “a pillow over his head.”
Since people have read “head” as “face,” Pointdexter has clarified:
Scalia “had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying. The pillow was against the headboard.”
The end.
When further reports indicate there was a bag over Scalia’s head and a fortune cookie on the nightstand, then we’ll have a suspect.
If, upon further investigation, a maid reports in broken English hearing someone in Scalia’s room saying “Call out and find no one there” we will know the truth.
That’s awful. What a terrible tragedy.
Sabr,
I think you are portraying modern pharmacology a little too simply. Again, this isn’t a matter of conspiracy but of removing reasonable doubt about a public figure. For over 60 years I have listened to Democrats blathering about the Kennedy Assassination. Recently, Michael Brown’s death, a private individual, warranted no less than three full forensic investigations even with multiple “black” eyewitnesses and still the Attorney General was spinning conspiracy.
I resent the fact that an ordinary minimal forensic investigation isn’t of interest when a Supreme Court Justice is involved. If I have a political motive in addition to the most ordinary motive of justice, so what!
At the risk of being insensitive, Antonin Scalia wasn’t just anybody’s grandmother.
Oh, never mind.
Regards,
Jim
Please understand that I present the following answer to Fred’s “Cui bono” question with tongue firmly in cheek. The teacher’s unions did it.
Either you lie, or Breaking Bad lies. And I watch too much TV to believe it has failed me now.
While Scalia was no slave to stare decisis I feel here he would see the precedential value of a full investigation of the dignified death of a man of both raw human vitality and dignity.
Why? Because a very detailed report of President Clinton’s future death, whether it be on Pedophile Isle or the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, is something we want on the public record.
To add to the list, I also often throw a pillow over my eyes when I sleep.
“Breaking Bad” would never lie because SCIENCE!
Evl,
Isn’t Hillary going to push a legalize prostitution law at some point. You know how pre-emptive the left can be. They just assumed Scalia would be in the way.
“Hookers for Hillary”: Nevada sex workers back Clinton
Hey, this absurd conspiracy thing is so much fun. I’ve got to get over my need for the facts and enjoy life more.
Regards,
Jim
I am not an ME, but there are some things that could kill a person if administered slowly over the course of months. Cyanide and arsenic can build up in the body, but it’s true that typically people would show signs of being sick. You could quickly induce cardiac arrest by injecting someone with a bolus of potassium, but at the end of the day, we don’t really know what happened to him if they don’t do an autopsy. When I was in the ER, a patient that died was an ME case if they hadn’t been seen by a doctor in the previous 6 months and didn’t have a history of chronic disease.
The little I’ve read about the circumstances of his death make it seem as though a massive MI or a lethal dysrhythmia was the culprit, given his cardiovascular disease. Evidently Scalia had injured his shoulder, but he was deemed “too weak” for surgical intervention. That means that the docs didn’t think he could survive being put under general anesthesia.
Weirdo.
I like to move the pillow off of someone’s face after I smother them so that it doesn’t look so suspicious. Pillows aren’t as hard to move as people think, even if you are in a hurry to escape the scene of a crime.
VC,
Thank you sweet angel of merciful rational factual information.
Regards,
Jim
Man, I feel like I need to get that cross-stitched and framed!
I doubt this. Pick any experiment, and try to decide what assumptions apply. You’ll find that it very quickly comes down to a wide range of highly subjective criteria.
Here is a classic example: Does G-d exist? Apply Occam’s Razor and tell me whether it is G-d’s existence or non-existence that relies on the most assumptions. I’ll wager that Ricochetti certainly cannot agree on it!
VC,
Hookers for Hillary. Nurses for Nikki.
Just sing it, sweet angel.
Regards,
Jim
I sleep with a pillow over my face all the time. As long as Ball’s in Japan I figure I’m safe.
(I kid…I kid…)