The Judicial Erosion of America's Foundational Pillars

The Judicial Erosion of America's Foundational Pillars
Written By: Ronald Simpson-Bey

Recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court are evidence of the Court’s slide down the slippery slope of eroding the social fabric of our democratic society. In a recent ruling on the landmark case regarding the right to remain silent as established in Miranda v. Arizona, the Court reduced police accountability by limiting the ability of an accused person to sue a police officer for damages caused by evidence obtained without a Miranda warning, even if that evidence was ultimately used against them in a criminal trial. In addition to a number of other protections impacted by this decision, the Court's ruling also bars civil lawsuits against the offending law enforcement officer.  

This is the third in a string of Supreme Court rulings that have rolled back basic human and civil rights protections for our society. In the decision of Shinn v. Ramirez, written by Clarence Thomas, the Court ruled that incarcerated people will no longer have recourse to federal judicial relief even when they claim they were wrongfully convicted because their lawyers failed to conduct their cases properly. This ruling flies in the face of the foundational Sixth Amendment constitutional right to a fair trial.

Additionally, with the recent gutting of Roe v. Wade, we are speeding along the journey back to bottom of the barrel for the Supreme Court, harkening back to the Court’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, in which Justice Roger Taney opined that black people "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Fast forward to the shameful opinion of Herrera v. Collins, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in which he opined that the Court has “never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” The Court further stated, “it was pointless to find the petitioner innocent because innocence, by itself, was not a legal basis to overturn the conviction.”

In determining if a particular punishment constitutes a cruel or unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, the court is required to consider that the "Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person, and the punishment of criminals must conform to that rule."

In applying this standard to these recent Court rulings, instead of “evolving” standards, we see a "devolving" of the standards of decency through the Court’s rolling back of the historical civil rights protections of Miranda, the elimination of the right to effective assistance of counsel during criminal trials, and the gutting of the rights of women to determine their own health and reproductive rights. These rulings portend ominous things to come regarding civil protections in our society, as they further erode the foundational pillars on which our country was built. I hope there is nationwide outrage and response to address these horrible decisions by the Court, launched by legal organizations like NLADA, the American Bar Association (ABA), and others.