With the spotlight on Judge Alito (if not on the entire Senate confirmation hearing), news outlets outside the South are ignoring a little ethical tempest there about judicial activism. Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, formerly an aide to "Ten Commandments" former Justice Roy Moore, wrote an op-ed piece earlier this month in The Birmingham News excoriating his fellow justices for following precedent as established by the US Supreme Court. Talk about your stare decisis. He's particularly upset about Roper v. Simmons (huge pdf file if you want it all; short version: it bars the execution of minors, i.e. people who were minors when they committed their crime). When the state supreme court thus commuted a convicted rapist-murderer's death sentence to life in prison with no chance of parole, Justice Parker was enraged:
You see, my fellow Alabama justices freed [the criminal Renaldo Adams] from Death Row not because of any error of our courts but because they chose to passively accommodate -- rather than actively resist -- the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Those liberal justices declared last spring in the case of Roper vs. Simmons that "evolving standards of decency" now make it "unconstitutional" to execute murderers who were minors at the time of their crime.
[The justices in question are Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer.]
The ABA Journal seems to be the only news outlet with a national reach that's interested in the story, noting that
Canon 2 of the state judicial code ... holds that a judge should "respect and comply with the law" and at all times conduct himself in a manner that promotes public confidence in the judiciary's integrity and impartiality. "He's daring someone to file a judicial inquiry complaint," says Joseph Van Heest, president of the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
One would think that the Moore link alone would make a few journos' ears perk up, especially given Moore's political plans, but only at the lawyers' journal:
Moore in October announced a run for governor, and it has been mentioned in the legal community that Parker plans to run for the chief justice seat. Van Heest wonders if Parker's piece in the Birmingham News is a campaign kickoff.
"Not only does he attack his own court, I think very unwisely, he uses old language that can only be attributed to someone who's running for election on the fringes," Van Heest says. He mentions a portion of Parker's piece that refers to the state's "pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity and other blessings of our great state."