Doubting Thomas Rips Doubting Justices

Letter to Romans: Liberal Justices aren’t the only ones at times angry at colleagues for supposedly being biased. As an example of how ideologically balanced the Court is in practice tho, consider conservative Justice Thomas slamming the majority in a recent dissent.

The Fox News headline summed it up nicely: “Thomas unloads on Court for helping convicted murderer but ignoring ‘law-abiding citizens’.”  What got the Justice’s goat was the 7-2 majority vacating a Florida murder conviction and essentially requiring a new trial. It did so, because the state’s appellate court confiming the conviction had inappropriately alluded to false testimony from a prosecution witness & new aka post-trial DNA evidence. As Thomas noted, however, the appellate court’s “technical” error could have been cured while there was other, “overwhelming evidence” of the defendant’s guilt. He argued the appellate court’s “inconsequential foot fault” would have had “no effect on the outcome of the case.” Among other things convicting the defendant at trial was evidence showing the victim’s blood inside the defendant’s boots, while both were seen together at a bank where the victim withdrew all his money from his account.

In summing up his dissent that was joined by Justice Alito, Thomas cut to the chase & identified the real thorn in his paw: “What makes the Court’s ruling [on a “technicality”] worse is that it does so even while it refuses to correct far more consequential errors for law-abiding citizens.” He specially called out the Court’s recent ruling limiting DEI initiatives on constitutional grounds. Yet here it “ignored” the “parents of Boston U students challenging an affirmative-action policy they argue constitutes unconstitutional race discrimination … even after lower courts conspicuously flout [the Supreme Court’s] precedents that likely grant them relief.

Davd Soul