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Ninth Circuit hijinks, filibusters, racial quotas, and criminal-coddling:
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| Apr. 29 | 1998—The Ninth Circuit’s hijinks in blocking the execution of Thomas M. Thompson for a 1981 rape and murder come to an end, with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Calderon v. Thompson. Justice Souter’s dissent is joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer. |
| May 1 | 1992—The Ninth Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Betty B. Fletcher and joined by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, rules that the provision of a government-paid sign-language interpreter to a profoundly deaf student who has chosen to attend a “sectarian” (read: Catholic) high school violates the Establishment Clause. One year later, the Supreme Court reverses the Ninth Circuit (in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District) by a 5-4 vote. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion states: “[Federal law] creates a neutral government program dispensing aid not to schools but to individual handicapped children. If a handicapped child chooses to enroll in a sectarian school, we hold that the Establishment Clause does not prevent the school district from furnishing him with a sign language interpreter there in order to facilitate his education.” Justices Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor and Souter dissent. 2003—Two years after being nominated to the Fifth Circuit, the eminently qualified Texas supreme court justice Priscilla Richman Owen encounters another step in the Democrats’ unprecedented campaign of obstruction against President Bush’s judicial nominees. The first of five Senate cloture votes on her nomination fails to obtain the necessary 60 votes for approval, as only two of 49 Democrats vote for cloture. Owen’s nomination is finally confirmed more than two years later (and more than four years from her initial nomination)—on May 25, 2005. |
| May 3 | 1984—Federal district judge H. Lee Sarokin modifies a consent decree to require that layoffs of New Jersey firefighters be on a proportional quota basis rather than (as state law provided) according to seniority. The result is that white firefighters with more seniority were to be laid off in favor of minority firefighters with less seniority. In an especially bizarre twist, Sarokin rules that his order constitutes an unconstitutional taking of the seniority rights of white firefighters, and he orders the federal government, which opposed his order, to provide compensation for the taking! Sarokin expresses sympathy for the white firefighters, stating that they are “not themselves the perpetrators of the wrongs inflicted upon minorities over the years [but] are being singled out to suffer the consequences.”
In June 1984, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Firefighters v. Stotts forces Sarokin to change his order and to have seniority govern layoffs, Sarokin changes his tone and attacks the white firefighters: “If they have not directly caused the discrimination to occur, many have certainly condoned it by their acquiescence, their indifference, their attitudes and prejudices, and even their humor.” |
| May 4 | 1984—When is an express signed waiver of Miranda rights not a waiver? When you try to conceal your identity by signing a false name. So rules federal district judge H. Lee Sarokin (in an unpublished opinion in United States v. Rodriguez). Rodriguez had been arrested on theft-related charges and was advised of his Miranda rights and informed that signing the waiver form would waive those rights. He signed the form, but, intent on concealing his identity, signed someone else’s name. Sarokin rules that “it does not strain logic to find the use of a name other than one’s own to be wholly inconsistent with a voluntary waiver of rights: defendant may well have believed that by using a false name he was not committing himself to anything.”
In a remarkable display of chutzpah, Sarokin immediately follows this assertion with a “But see” citation to specific and contrary Third Circuit authority that he himself describes as standing for the proposition that “contention that signature was not one’s own is not relevant to the issue of the voluntariness of the confession”. A more blatant defiance of controlling authority of a higher court is difficult to imagine. |
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For an explanation of this recurring feature, see here. |
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