The Supreme Court has veered so far off track that even the harshest language can feel inadequate to capture the damage wrought by its most recent term. Singling out individual decisions may inadvertently obscure the broader trends that, taken together, amount to a wholesale assault on democratic self-government. That is what makes Hawaiʻi Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins’ excoriating assessment of the term so valuable. In an opinion handed down Wednesday, the justice once again refused to import SCOTUS’s “results-driven approach to due process” into state law. He explained that the Hawaiʻi Constitution “takes no instruction” from “hubristic originalists” who are “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.” A Supreme Court “that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity,” he concluded, “does not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution.”
Eddins’ opinion is consequential on its own terms: It expands protections for criminal defendants by making it easier for them to overturn a conviction obtained through expert testimony that has since been “scientifically discredited.” But his scathing criticism of SCOTUS—and in particular the disastrous term that recently wrapped—is just as important. Sitting judges arguably have the best informed perspective on this Supreme Court: They must apply its jurisprudence, reconcile its contradictions, and confront the real-world effects of its rulings. It is a shame that so few are brave enough to speak candidly about the constitutional wreckage left by the Republican-appointed supermajority. The rarity of Eddins’ indictment makes it all the more valuable.
Granillo v. Hawaii, decided on Wednesday, concerns convictions built on false forensic evidence. At Daniel Granillo’s 1990 trial for sexual assault, prosecutors used FBI hair-and-fiber analysis to place the victim in his car and bolster her account. He was sentenced to 40 years. Later, the National Academy of Sciences and a federal science panel concluded that such comparisons cannot identify a unique source, and in 2017 the Department of Justice notified Hawaiʻi that the FBI expert in Granillo’s case had overstated what the method could prove.
The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court unanimously vacated Granillo’s conviction but split 3–2 over the governing rule. Eddins’ majority applied the false-evidence standard used when prosecutors knowingly present untrue testimony, holding that the state constitution makes the prosecutor’s knowledge irrelevant. “What matters is whether the trial was fair,” he wrote, “not whether the prosecutor knew it wasn’t.” A defendant need show only a “reasonable possibility” that the bogus forensics swayed even one juror. Two concurring justices favored harmless-error review, which would preserve the verdict if the state proved, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” that the discredited testimony did not affect the outcome.
That disagreement became the occasion for a much broader critique. Eddins accused the concurrence of trying to graft the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal due process onto the Hawaiʻi Constitution, then widened the lens to explain why Hawaiʻi should reject SCOTUS’s conception of more than just due process. “What this court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law,” Eddins wrote, “explains why Hawaiʻi’s Constitution takes no instruction from it.” For instance, the Hawaiʻi judiciary takes “no guidance on the meaning of due process from a court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs” by erasing a “generations-long constitutional right, stripping autonomy from half the population, and empowering states to force birth.” It “does not import that results-driven approach to due process. We follow principles, not agendas.” And so it “does not anchor Hawaiʻi’s due process rights to the federal floor. Especially one that keeps sinking.”
But “the Supreme Court’s imperious ideology,” Eddins continued, “does not stop at due process. The same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself,” a process that accelerated over the term that just ended. Its “judicial demolition” of the Voting Rights Act culminated in Louisiana v. Callais, which “buried what remained of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Pretend law for a real statute.” The supermajority “then ditched its own thirty-two day default for releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years.” Just weeks later, “on its shadow docket, the court tossed an eleven-day trial record built on fifty-one witnesses, 790 exhibits, 2,600 pages of testimony, and a 270-page opinion by a three-judge court.” In the process, “it resurrected a tainted congressional map the three-judge factfinders found deliberately entrenched racial bias against Black voters.”
The Roberts court, Eddins declared, “sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect. The freed people, their descendants, and all others denied equal citizenship. It turns its back on what is in plain sight. The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.” He continued:
The court calls the Constitution colorblind while engineering the dilution of Black votes, the unraveling of hard-fought civil rights remedies, and the erasure of Black history. That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design. A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It is whatever the court needs it to be. A way to advance its partisan project.
And this “damage to democracy extends beyond the Voting Rights Act.” In upholding Donald Trump’s mass expulsion of Haitian immigrants, the court looked at “naked racism” and saw “none of it.” In gutting a federal religious liberty law, the court “forged the Spending Clause to reduce some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements.” Days later, in Trump v. Slaughter, it used “a cherry-picked slice of history” to let Trump “fire at will” executive officials who are shielded from removal: “a century of settled practice recast as a mistake, competent governance sacrificed to the partisan cause.” Then, in the birthright citizenship case, “fair-weather textualists—living constitution originalists, really—deserted the text and our nation’s history the moment it promised citizenship, one vote from writing that right out of the Constitution.”
SCOTUS’s “hubristic originalists” have also corrupted our elections more broadly. The supermajority, Eddins wrote, has given “corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and-blood Americans,” letting “dollars talk louder than voters.” Just last month, it shredded “coordinated spending limits Congress had enacted, ensuring “that those who bankroll elections drown out the ordinary person.” As a result, “billionaires spend to be repaid. Everyone else just votes. The Roberts Court has made sure one’s wealth counts more than another’s vote.”
Meanwhile, SCOTUS “abandoned partisan gerrymandering to the gerrymanderers,” to devastating effect across the country today. It “placed a president above the law,” effectively “crowning” Trump as a king. It is “making the country more dangerous with a Second Amendment unmoored from text or history and unrecognizable to the framers who wrote it.” Just this June, it struck down “a careful law” to protect Hawaiʻi from gun violence, “showing disdain for Hawaiʻi’s constitutional traditions” in the process.
“That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately,” Eddins concluded. “But it’s enough.” The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court “needs no part of this. The Hawaiʻi Constitution was built to stand on its own. And so it does.” Eddins’ court is merely “doing what state constitutionalism asks us to do. Stand our ground.”
This well-timed excoriation is no surprise, coming from a justice who routinely condemns the “horrors and treachery” inflicted by the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed supermajority. But it remains immensely valuable for two related reasons. First, Eddins weaves together various threads from this term (and those preceding it) to show the entire web of ultrapartisan judicial policymaking in which the nation is now ensnared. This larger project can disappear from view when the court inundates us with so many radical rulings at once that they do not register as parts of a single scheme. Second, Eddins speaks with unusual authority as a sitting judge with skin in the game. He has stuck his neck out not only to draw attention to the crisis but to remind Americans that they are not helpless. State judiciaries harbor considerable authority to expand individual liberties and democratic guarantees beyond what SCOTUS requires. Far too many shrink from the task. Hawaiʻi’s will not.
The Roberts court may try to ignore the call coming from inside the house. Yet its authority is not self-executing: It relies on lower courts to implement its decisions, extend their logic, and normalize the resulting excesses. When state judges refuse to carry that project any further than federal law requires, the machinery of judicial supremacy begins to jam. Eddins has shown his colleagues exactly where to stick the wrench.
