The Conservatives vs. Sonia Sotomayor

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/sonia-sotomayor-has-become-a-lonely-voice-fighting-against-the-supreme-courts-rightward-turn.html

The Conservatives vs. Sonia Sotomayor
The liberal justice has become a lonely voice fighting against the Supreme Court’s rightward turn.

By Mark Joseph Stern
April 02, 20187:11 PM


On Monday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court made the American criminal justice system a little less just. First, the court granted immunity to a police officer who shot a woman four times because she was holding a kitchen knife. Second, the court rejected an appeal from two capital defendants in Florida who argue, quite plausibly, that they were sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from both decisions in a pair of opinions seething with indignation at her colleagues’ solicitude for violent cops and indifference toward death row inmates. Her dissents illustrate a galling asymmetry in the court’s jurisprudence. Powerful defendants get a quick helping hand. Powerless ones get screwed.

snip//

Sotomayor has criticized “shoot first, think later” policing in the past. But her Kisela opinion is especially poignant in light of its pairing with a second Sotomayor dissent that was released on Monday, this one on a capital punishment case out of Florida. In 2015, the Supreme Court invalidated Florida’s strange death penalty scheme, which allowed juries to recommend life or death but let the judge make the final call. The court found that the jury, not the judge, must find the facts necessary to sentence a defendant to death. In response, the Florida Supreme Court transformed juries’ recommendations into binding factual findings that make the defendant death-eligible.

That, however, creates a new problem: The Supreme Court has also ruled that a capital sentence is unconstitutional when the “sentencer … has been led to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the defendant’s death rests elsewhere.” Thus, by purporting to resolve one constitutional flaw, the Florida Supreme Court created another one, retroactively saddling a jury with the responsibility of a death sentence that it had recommended but did not expect to be binding.

The Florida Supreme Court has consistently disregarded this dilemma of its own creation. And the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently declined to step in and settle the issue, even though Florida’s death row inmates keep appealing. Each time the court fails to act, Sotomayor writes a dissent denouncing its apathy. On Monday, Sotomayor made her case all over again, pointing out that “at least six capital defendants” now “face execution by the State without having received full consideration of their claims.”

To drive home her frustration, Sotomayor cited André Gide, a gay French novelist and critic who won the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer,” she wrote in a footnote, quoting Gide. Translation: “Everything has been said already; but as no one listens, we must always begin again.”

The quote neatly captures Sotomayor’s jurisprudential philosophy at this rather dark moment in American law. In case after case, the court insulates the powerful from the consequences of their actions, then ignores the pleas of vulnerable defendants who have nowhere else to turn. Sotomayor alone can’t reverse the trend. But she can object, time and again, even if her colleagues refuse to listen.

[bettyellen]

1. Thanks for posting this- so proud of my homegirl!

[SCantiGOP]

2. Dont forget the Notorious RBG

She has her back.
But Sonia will lead the progressive wing for the foreseeable future.

[summer_in_TX]

3. Where the hell was Kagan on these issues?

Standing with those who already have power?