| Barkett’s mental age, Ninth Circuit dysfunction, and New York Times standards: | |
| Aug. 11 | 2006—In a separate opinion in Henyard v. McDonough, Eleventh Circuit judge Barkett, reaching out to address an issue that she concedes (with considerable understatement) “may not be directly before us,” opines that the Eighth Amendment should be construed to bar the death penalty for murderers “with a mental age of less than eighteen years.” What exactly Barkett means by “mental age” is confused. At one point, she quotes, with seeming approval, a definition of “mental age” as the “chronological age equivalent of the person’s highest level of mental capacity.” But she inconsistently equates it with “emotional level” and says that “even high IQ in an adult defendant” is compatible with “a mental age of a child.” Her test appears to be whether a murderer shares a “child’s inability to understand why the rules exist, to appreciate the consequences of breaking them for herself and for society, and to consistently make judgments based on the foregoing.”
Barkett’s test virtually ensures that most heinous murderers will be deemed to have a mental age below 18. Indeed, she states that there is “no dispute” that Richard Henyard—who carjacked a mother and her two daughters (ages 7 and 3), raped and shot the mother, and shot and killed the daughters—has a mental age below 18. Barkett’s test would seem to establish that she has the mental age of a child. Does This Week perennial Barkett “understand why the rules exist”? Does she “appreciate the consequences of breaking them”—through her lawless judicial activism? Does she “consistently make judgments based” on those understandings? From the evidence that pervades This Week entries, the answers are no, no, and no. |
| Aug. 15 | 1938—Stephen Gerald Breyer is born in San Francisco. An expert on regulation and a professor at Harvard Law School, Breyer serves from 1979 to 1980 as chief counsel to Teddy Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His reward: On November 13, 1980—after Ronald Reagan has defeated Jimmy Carter in his bid for re-election and after Republicans have won control of the new Senate—Carter nominates Breyer to a newly created seat on the First Circuit. His nomination is promptly confirmed. In 1994 President Clinton appoints Breyer to replace retiring justice Harry A. Blackmun on the Supreme Court. (See This Week for July 29, 1994.) His jurisprudence has been aptly described by one perceptive critic as “judicial willfulness masquerading as judicial deference.” |
| Aug. 16 | 1996—One reason that the Ninth Circuit is so dysfunctional is that it fails to make responsible use of its en banc procedures to override panel rulings that conflict with Supreme Court precedent. In his opinion in Wicklund v. Salvagni, Judge Stephen Reinhardt rules that the judicial-bypass provision of a Montana statute requiring parental notice for minors’ abortions is unconstitutional under the Ninth Circuit’s 1991 ruling in Glick v. McKay. Reinhardt rejects the argument that the Glick ruling was contrary to Supreme Court precedent and does not raise the possibility of en banc review.
In a per curiam ruling (in Lambert v. Wicklund), the Supreme Court, seeing no need for briefing or oral argument, unanimously reverses the Ninth Circuit holding on the ground that it is “in direct conflict with our precedents.” 1999—By a vote of 4 to 3, the Ohio supreme court rules (in State ex rel. Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers v. Sheward) that tort-reform legislation violates separation-of-powers principles and the ever-malleable single-subject rule. |
| Aug. 17 | 2006—In what one expert commentator aptly labels a “transparently political screed,” Michigan federal district judge (and Carter appointee) Anna Diggs Taylor rules that the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program is unconstitutional. Displaying its usual regard for the truth, the next day the New York Times editorial page praises Taylor’s “careful, thoroughly grounded opinion.” Alas for the paper’s poor editorialists, the following day the Times runs a front-page article—“Experts Fault Reasoning in Surveillance Decision”—that reports that “[e]ven legal experts who agreed with [Taylor’s] conclusion” say that her opinion “overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions.” (How’s that for “careful” and “thoroughly grounded”?) Even Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, in the course of self-indulgently criticizing Taylor’s critics for self-indulgent criticism, complains that her opinion “seems almost to have been written more to poke a finger in the President’s eye than to please the legal commentariat or even, alas, to impress an appellate panel.” But Tribe concludes that “her bottom line is very likely to survive appellate review.”
In July 2007, the Sixth Circuit overturns Taylor’s ruling, as a divided panel rejects her threshold determination that the plaintiffs had standing to pursue their claims. |
| For an explanation of this recurring feature, see here. | |