Federal Judiciary

Alito and Roberts Blow a Case

By Quin

It behooves us who have fought for confirmations of judicial conservatives to monitor the performance of those judges after they reach the bench. As this site's earliest and fiercest advocate for Samuel Alito, and as somebody who continues to admire Alito greatly and who is still happy Alito is on the bench, I must now regretfully report that Alito has written a real stinker of an opinion, joined by all the other justices except the superb Clarence Thomas (who wrote the dissent) and Antonin Scalia. The opinion is discusssed here: http://howappealing.law.com/031908.html#032884. (Links to the opinion and dissent are within that link.) It involves a death penalty case in which, more than a decade after the trial, the Supreme Court now overturns the conviction and death penalty because a black juror was stricken in a peremptory challenge and the high court now determines that the challenge was racially motivated. Never mind that case law provides for a high degree of deference to the findings of the trial court (which in this case found no racially discriminatory intent) on matters of fact, and never mind that the LA Supreme Court (which, by the way, is hardly controlled by conservatives) twice found that the trial court's determination passed muster.(MORE)

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Full post as published by ConfirmThem on March 19, 2008 (boomark / email).