Should state supreme courts refuse to follow Gideon, Miranda, Blakely?
How Appealing just linked to this stunning op-ed by Justice Tom Parker of the Supreme Court of Alabama, which apparently appeared on Sunday in The Birmingham News. In his jaw-dropping commentary, Justice Parker contends that his colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court should have declined to follow Roper in order to keep a juvenile killer on death row. Here is part of his argument:
State supreme courts may decline to follow bad U.S. Supreme Court precedents because those decisions bind only the parties to the particular case. Judges around the country normally follow precedents in similar cases because they know that if those cases go before the Court again they are likely to receive the same verdict. But state supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are “precedents.”…
The Adams case presented the Alabama Supreme Court with the perfect opportunity to give the new U.S. Supreme Court the occasion to overturn the unconstitutional Roper precedent. If our Court had voted to uphold Adams’ death penalty, he would have appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Because the U.S. Supreme Court can accept only a handful of the petitions it receives, the Court may not have heard the case at all, and Adams would have been executed as he deserves. However, if the new John Roberts-led court had taken the case, it could very well have overturned Roper.
But even if, in the worst-case scenario, the Roberts Court had taken the Adams case but failed to overturn Roper, the Alabama Supreme Court would have been none the worse for standing up against judicial activism.
After all, the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court already look down on the pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity, and other blessings of our great state.
We Alabamians will never be able to sufficiently appease such establishment liberals, so we should stop trying and instead stand up for what we believe without apology. Conservative judges today are on the front lines of the war against political correctness and judicial tyranny.
These quotes highlight not only Justice Parker’s passion, but also his limited ability to count heads. None of the new Justices are replacing anyone in the Roper majority, so it would be quite a feat for a Roberts Court to undue Roper.
Moreover, I continue to find it remarkable that persons purportedly concerned about pro-family policies and evangelical Christian blessings become so aggrieved by a decision which precludes states from executing juvenile offenders. I wonder if Justice Parker has read the recent editorial series from his own Birmingham News, entitled “Choosing Life in a Death Penalty State,” which forcefully argues that a true pro-family, evangelical Christian commitment to a culture of life calls for doing away with the death penalty altogether.
Finally, I wonder if Justice Parker thinks that state supreme courts ought to actively resist the application of other contentious SCOTUS rulings like Gideon or Miranda or Blakely. (Of course, some might claim that California and Tennessee and a few other states are already actively resisting Blakely.)
UPDATE: I see Steve Vladeck at PrawfsBlawg has some more thoughts about the op-ed in this post titled “Apparently, the Supremacy Clause Doesn’t Apply in Alabama.”