1969—Mired in scandal, Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas announces his resignation from the Court. Fortas’s resignation comes less than a year after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s unsuccessful effort to have Fortas succeed Earl Warren as chief justice.
1970—President Richard M. Nixon, in one of the misdeeds for which he most deserves infamy, appoints Harry A. Blackmun to the Supreme Court. Blackmun, a boyhood friend of Chief Justice Warren Burger, had served on the Eighth Circuit since 1959. Before that, he had been in-house counsel for the Mayo Clinic. His appreciation for the outstanding work done by the fine doctors at the Mayo Clinic is said to have led him to regret that he himself did not become a doctor. Those with a proper appreciation of Blackmun’s Supreme Court decisionmaking—including, but by no means limited to, his notorious opinion in Roe v. Wade (see This Day for January 22)—might fairly observe that the medical profession’s loss was the nation’s … loss.
2009—Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and (per its website) the individual “responsible for all phases of the organization’s programs, including litigation,” takes part in a confidential strategy meeting with counsel planning to file a federal lawsuit against Proposition 8. After counsel files the complaint in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Ripston’s organization will file pre-trial and post-trial amicus briefs in support of plaintiffs, and Ripston will publicly “rejoice” over Judge Vaughn Walker’s August 2010 ruling against Proposition 8.
But when Ripston’s husband, arch-activist Stephen Reinhardt, is assigned to the Ninth Circuit panel charged with reviewing Walker’s ruling, Reinhardt somehow will decline to recuse himself from the case.
2020—In Hines v. Mays, a Sixth Circuit panel rules that Anthony Hines is entitled to a new trial on his conviction for a murder 35 years earlier because his attorney should have tried harder to blame someone else for the murder.
Ten months later, the Supreme Court will summarily reverse the panel’s ruling. Reciting the “overwhelming evidence” of Hines’s guilt and the “farfetched” and “fanciful” theory that another man committed the murder, the Court faults the panel for an “approach [that] plainly violated Congress’ prohibition on disturbing state-court judgments on federal habeas review absent an error that lies beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.”