https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/covid-elena-kagan-supreme-court-kill.html
From Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom:
I fervently hope that the Court’s intervention will not worsen the Nation’s COVID crisis. But if this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict.
Photo: Mike Ball
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Ruth Marcus writes about U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in WashPost:
. . . .
Still, Jackson, named to the district court by Obama in 2013, brings to the bench an intriguing — and for the Democratic Party’s restless progressives, attractive — piece of career diversity as well: experience as a public defender.
No current Supreme Court justice has the perspective of having been a public defender, representing indigent defendants, although several — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Brett M. Kavanaugh, in his role as associate independent counsel — have prosecutorial experience.
For Jackson, the daughter of two public school teachers (her father later became a lawyer), the criminal justice system has an unusually personal wrinkle as well: Her uncle was convicted of a low-level drug crime when she was a senior in high school, and was sentenced to life in prison under a draconian three-strikes law. (He had been convicted previously of two minor offenses.) He ended up receiving clemency from Obama after serving three decades.
She also brings the real-world perspective of a working mother. In a remarkably candid speech at the University of Georgia in 2017, Jackson described the challenges she encountered juggling private practice at a major law firm, marriage to a surgeon and motherhood to two young daughters.
“I think it is not possible to overstate the degree of difficulty that many young women, and especially new mothers, face in the law firm context,” she observed. “The hours are long; the workflow is unpredictable; you have little control over your time and schedule; and you start to feel as though the demands of the billable hour are constantly in conflict with the needs of your children and your family responsibilities.” How refreshing to hear from a self-confessed non-Superwoman.
. . . .
But a more obscure ruling, involving William Pierce, a deaf D.C. man who was imprisoned for 51 days after a domestic dispute, may offer more insight into Jackson’s belief in law as a mechanism for achieving justice. Corrections officials did nothing to accommodate Pierce’s disability, as the law requires, ignoring his repeated requests for a sign-language interpreter.
Jackson assailed prison officials’ “willful blindness regarding Pierce’s need for accommodation.” She said it was “astonishing” for D.C. to claim that it had done enough, when “prison employees took no steps whatsoever” to figure out how to help him. And she took the unusual step of ruling for Pierce even before trial.
You can learn a lot about a judge by the way she handles the biggest-profile cases, involving those at the highest levels of government. But perhaps the more revealing test is how she applies the law to help those with the least power and the greatest need for justice.
Washington D.C.
Official Photo
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Read the full articles at the above links. “Willful blindness” and intentional abuses intended to “dehumanize” are daily occurrences in our warped and broken “immigration justice system” as almost any immigration/human rights/civil rights lawyer could tell you. It just operates below the radar screen, on the border, or in foreign countries (to which vulnerable humans seeking legal refuge are arbitrarily and capriciously “orbited”) where the very human trauma, torture, sickness, desolation, despair, and death are “out of sight, out of mind” to most Federal Judges and Justices.
Yes, eventually journalists and historians will document for posterity the disastrous human rights abuses in which the Federal Judiciary is complicit. But, by then it will be far too late for those who have suffered and died while those in black robes shirked their legal and moral duties!
Judge Jackson understands exactly what’s missing from today’s all too often elitist, non-diverse, non-representative Federal Judiciary (including much of the Immigration Judiciary) who are tone-deaf to, and insulated from, responsibility for the human trauma and injustice caused by their bad decisions.
Additionally, I can assure Justice Kagan that vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers (including children) have died and unnecessarily suffered lifetime trauma from the Supremes’ willful failure to enforce the Constitution against overt Executive tyranny in cases involving the “Remain in Mexico” (“Let ‘Em Die In Mexico”) Program, return of asylum seekers to torture and death with no due process whatsoever, and the “Muslim Ban.”
Indeed, the Supremes’ majority’s abdication of responsibility in the latter case led directly to Trump’s eventual insurrection against the Capitol. He was assured early on by Roberts and others that he was above the Constitution, uncountable, and exempt from normal conventions governing human decency and treatment of the most vulnerable among us in the 21st Century. I/O/W, “Dred Scottification” of the “other” — a 21st Century “Jim Crow Regime” — was A-OK with the GOP Supremes’ majority “forever insulat[ed] . . . from responsibility for [their] errors.”
Today in particular, our nation still struggles with the sense of impunity and unaccountability improperly conferred by a dilatory Supremes’ majority on their party and its leader. Insurrection, violence, attempted overthrow of democracy — it’s all “no problem” to a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority unconcerned with the fate of our democracy.
After all, the Trump’s magamoron rioters weren’t storming their marble halls — just those of the supposedly co-equal branch across the street. But, what might have happened if they had actually stood up against Trump? He might have identified them as “the enemy” and sent his rioters their way! Worth thinking about, Oh Cloistered Ones far removed from the pain and suffering you help cause and countenance!
A better judiciary 🧑🏽⚖️👨🏻⚖️👩⚖️ for a better America! Bring on the “practical scholars” and those with actual experience representing the mostly vulnerable among us (asylum seekers are a prime example) in court.
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!
PWS
02-09-21