Hawaii’s highest Court launched a rare attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the John Roberts-led bench of enabling “naked racism” and bending the Constitution to “whatever the Court needs it to be.”
The broadside came buried inside a ruling handed down this week that threw out the controversial 1990 rape conviction of a Maui man. The court found that discredited FBI hair-and-fiber testimony was false and denied Daniel Granillo a fair trial, and ordered a new trial.
Using the ruling as a vehicle, Justice Todd Eddins explained why Hawaii no longer takes its cues on constitutional rights from Washington, and he opened with race.
“The Roberts Court sees only white,” Eddins charged, opening with an attack on the chief justice.
“That is not blindness,” the opinion said, arguing that the court’s racial preferences were at the heart of its decisions. “That is white sight, by design.”
Eddins pointed to the Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling, he wrote, buried “the crown jewel of the civil rights movement,” and he accused the justices of “looking at naked racism and seeing none of it.”
That record, Eddins argued, exposed the court’s colorblind pose as a fiction. “A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind,” he wrote. “It is whatever the Court needs it to be.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was,” Eddins insisted of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
The opinion then turned from race to money. On rulings that lifted limits on political spending, Eddins wrote that the wealthy had bought the system.
“Billionaires spend to be repaid,” the opinion charged. “Everyone else just votes.”
He was harsh, too, on the decision granting President Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution, writing that the court had “placed a president above the law.”
The whole record, Eddins argued, freed Hawaii to disregard the Court. State constitutionalism, he wrote, makes it easy to treat “Roberts Court jurisprudence” as “white noise.”
He closed by refusing to take any further instructions from Supreme Court justices.
“That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately,” the opinion concluded. “But it’s enough.”
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