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Justice Sotomayor Slams "Disturbing Trend" of Supreme Court Siding With the Police

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court has a “disturbing trend” of siding with officers over their alleged victims in cases involving the use of force by police. That’s according to a stinging dissent issued on Monday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, after the full court voted to let stand the dismissal of a lawsuit against a Houston cop who shot a man in the back during a traffic stop. The court, Sotomayor wrote, has reliably reversed lower-court rulings that favored the plaintiff in such cases, “but we rarely intervene where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit” of the doubt. Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg joined Sotomayor’s dissent.

One night in October 2010, Ricardo Salazar-Limon and his friends were driving on a highway outside of Houston when Houston Police Officer Chris Thompson pulled him over. After running the driver’s license and registration and finding nothing amiss, Thomson asked Salazar-Limon to step out of his truck—apparently to conduct a Breathalyzer test. Thompson then tried to handcuff Salazar-Limon, but the driver resisted and began walking back to his truck with his back to Thompson. The officer then drew his gun and ordered him to stop. Salazar-Limon says Thompson shot him within seconds of that order. Thompson claims he fired only after Salazar-Limon reached for his waistband—as if for a weapon—and turned toward him. No weapon was found.

Salazar-Limon sustained crippling injuries. In 2011, he sued Thompson and the Houston police for violating his civil rights. But a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Thompson had qualified immunity because he’d shot Salazar-Limon in the course of his lawful duties. Salazar-Limon never explicitly denied reaching for his waistband during his deposition, nor, the judge wrote, did he offer evidence that he hadn’t—so the only conclusion a reasonable jury could reach was that he had. Thompson thus could have felt threatened and shot him because of it. A federal appeals court affirmed the ruling.

Salazar-Limon appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Monday decided not to hear the case. That was the wrong move, argued Sotomayor. A dismissal should only be granted, she wrote, when the facts of an incident are not in dispute. Thompson claimed the shooting was provoked. Salazar-Limon said it was not. The lower-court judge gave unfair privilege to the officer’s account, Sotomayor said. It was a jury’s job—not a district court judge’s—to determine whose story was more plausible. A juror, she wrote, could easily ask why Salazar-Limon would have reached for his waistband if he didn’t have a weapon. (In a footnote, she cited “the increasing frequency of incidents in which unarmed men allegedly reach for empty waistbands when facing law enforcement officers.”)

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the court rarely reviews cases “where the thrust of the claim is that a lower court simply erred in applying a settled rule of law to the facts of a particular case”—as opposed to cases in which the court is asked to interpret the law itself. But Sotomayor cited five recent cases in which the court intervened after a lower court ordered an offer to stand trial based on the facts of the case. Improperly dismissing lawsuits against officers who may have acted unlawfully “imposes no less harm” than trying officers who haven’t broken the law, she wrote.

The high court’s decision could encourage federal judges to dismiss civil lawsuits against police officers, says Joanna Schwartz, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who studies litigation against police. The ruling could also discourage attorneys from bringing such lawsuits, further limiting the options for redress against police abuses—as prosecutors rarely bring criminal cases and the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have little interest in doing so. “Lawyers are not making very much money off these cases. They bring these cases because they believe in them,” Schwartz told me. “As it becomes increasingly more difficult to win anything, it’s going to be even harder for lawyers to make the decision to represent these plaintiffs.”

Sotomayor’s dissent on Monday was her second recent one related to police tactics. Last summer, she cited author James Baldwin and The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates while slamming a Supreme Court ruling involving what she deemed an illegal search and seizure: “The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” she wrote. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”

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Justice Sotomayor Slams "Disturbing Trend" of Supreme Court Siding With the Police

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Chart of the Day: The Supreme Court Over the Past 70 Years

Mother Jones

Christopher Ingraham at Wonkblog pointed me to an interesting bit of data yesterday. It’s the Martin-Quinn measure of how the Supreme Court tilts over time, and apparently it’s widely accepted as reasonably accurate. Here it is for the entire postwar period:

There are two fascinating nuggets here:

Despite conservative kvetching, the Court has leaned conservative for all but seven years from 1946 to 2013. The seven years of the Warren Court are literally the only period in recent history during which the Court has been consistently liberal.
The Martin-Quinn measure depends on the votes of the median judge, which is Anthony Kennedy right now. This is what accounts for the Court’s recent shift to the left. According to his Martin-Quinn score, Kennedy has been getting steadily less conservative ever since he joined the Court, and over the past three years he’s become positively liberal:

I suppose this is old news to veteran court watchers, but it’s new to me. Has Kennedy really shifted that much over his career? And is he now generally left of center? If so, does this have anything to do with the effect of Sotomayor and Kagan joining the Court in 2009-10? It sure looks like it.

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Chart of the Day: The Supreme Court Over the Past 70 Years

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Black Juror: Prosecutors Treated Me "Like I Was a Criminal"

Mother Jones

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Until I contacted her in Rome, Georgia, on Tuesday, Marilyn Garrett had no idea she had become a minor celebrity in legal circles. Nearly 30 years ago, she briefly served in the jury pool during the capital trial of Timothy Foster, a 19-year-old black man charged with murdering an elderly white woman. The prosecutors dismissed her, along with every other African American called to serve, leaving an all-white jury that convicted Foster and sentenced him to death. On Monday, unbeknownst to her, the 63-year-old played a starring role in US Supreme Court arguments over racial discrimination in jury selection.

The rejection has stuck with Garrett all these years in large part because she felt like the prosecutors treated her “like I was a criminal.” Their interrogation left her in tears, she told me, even though she was just there to do her civic duty. Now she’s gotten a little payback, courtesy of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who channeled Garrett’s outrage in the chamber of the nation’s highest court.

Timothy Foster’s lawyers have long argued that the trial prosecutors illegally removed blacks from his jury pool, but the Georgia courts rejected every one of those arguments. The Supreme Court is now hearing the case thanks to a treasure trove of documents his lawyers discovered in 2006. A public records request unearthed prosecutors’ notes that make a mockery of a jury-selection process that was supposed to ensure racial fairness. (You can read about some of the sordid history here.)

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Black Juror: Prosecutors Treated Me "Like I Was a Criminal"

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