Supreme Court's unsigned rulings favor law enforcement; Reinhardt sees link to racial issues
The U.S. Supreme Court is using brief, unsigned opinions to rule against prisoners challenging their convictions and plaintiffs suing for alleged misconduct by government officials.
The opinions find no violations of “clearly established” federal law and no violation of “clearly established” legal principles, so that prisoners’ habeas appeals must fail and government officials have qualified immunity from liability, the New York Times reports in a Sidebar column.
The court issues eight unsigned opinions last year, and most were rulings favoring the government.
The Times story credits liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for noting parallels between the two kinds of cases in an article (PDF) for the Michigan Law Review.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which governs habeas appeals, “in the most inflexible and unyielding manner possible,” Reinhardt writes. And its interpretation of Section 1983 has erected similar limitations on the enforcement of constitutional rights violated by police or other local officials, he asserts.
The problem, Reinhardt says, is that the Supreme Court is requiring a prisoner or plaintiff to identify a decision involving nearly identical factual circumstances.
“On today’s court,” Reinhardt writes, “the unbroken march toward limiting constitutional rights and remedies for criminal defendants and the victims of police abuse reflects a continuing lack of understanding of the lives that so many minority group members experience in our country.”
“Rather than playing a positive role in counteracting racial discrimination,” Reinhardt writes, the court’s decisions “only exacerbated the problem.”
