The Roberts Court

On the recent, mind-boggling ruling from the SCOTUS:
Matthew Yglesias » Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent

Although Roberts conceded that “[i]t is now often possible to determine whether a biological tissue matches a suspect with near certainty,” he determined that Osburne has no right to pay for a test that could exonerate him for a crime he did not commit. Allowing Osburne to prove his potential innocence, Roberts said, risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

Obviously, the purpose of the established system of criminal justice is to use punishment of the guilty as a means of controlling crime. The general hostility of most people in the law enforcement and prosecutorial universe to exonerating evidence is a little bit hard to understand. The predominant thinking of Alaska in this case seems to be that the punishment of the innocent works as a close substitute for the punishment of the guilty, so that given the heinous nature of the crime the state has a strong interest in convicting someone or other of it irrespective of the facts. This is exactly the sort of madness and injustice we rely on the judicial system to rescue us from. But not the new Roberts Court!

The two cases handed down yesterday are just two new additions to the trend observed by Jeffrey Toobin, “in every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” That’s conservative jurisprudence in a nutshell.

It is interesting that one of the defining elements of the conservative court has been an unwavering hostility to the rights of and protections for the accused.   Rhenquist was no culture warrior, but he was a firm law-and-order judge, and even though I was unhappy about Roberts' nomination, I hoped that he would bring a more friendly view of defendant's rights to the court.

Also, it's interesting to note that Sotomayor was a former NY prosecutor.  A quick scan of wiki biographies for the current SCOTUS shows that there are two who served as Asst US Attorney Generals, two who served as state Attorney Generals, two who served as US Attorneys, and only three who seem to have no career prosecutorial experience.   So I suppose, partisan issues aside, it shouldn't be surprising that the Justices tend to favor the prosecutor's perspective to some degree.