Amazing. Two Supreme Court decisions came down yesterday and they are both travesties of anything that looks remotely like justice. First, we got CJ Roberts...well, here's the opening graf of Adam Liptak's NYT article, one of the most jaw-dropping ledes I think I've ever read.
Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.
The Right-wing Bush court has just thrown the Constitution out the window because - dig this - it got in the way of a state's right to be stoopid, mean, and vengeful on the wrong guy's ass and - in Alito's words - gave prisoners a new excuse "to play games with the criminal justice system.” Mind you, defendants are not even allowed to provide the tests at their own expense. It's all up to the states. Because, you know, it always has been.
The court divided along familiar ideological lines, with the majority emphasizing that 46 states already have laws that allow at least some prisoners to gain access to DNA evidence.
“To suddenly constitutionalize this area,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority, “would short-circuit what looks to be a prompt and considered legislative response.”
See? According to the Bush SCOTUS, if a defendant gets arrested for a crime he didn't commit, he won't be allowed to prove he didn't commit it if he makes the mistake of living in the wrong state when he doesn't do it. Or something.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is conservative justice. How you like it?
But they weren't done. Oh, no. They also covered themselves in corporate glory by dumping proof of age discrimination in employment entirely on the plaintiff. (Via Avedon Carol)
Life just got a little tougher for the over-40 crowd. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court ruled that in age-bias claims, the plaintiffs will have the full burden of proving that age was a factor in their firing or demotion. From the Los Angeles Times:
With workplace age-discrimination claims rising rapidly, the Supreme Court made it much harder Thursday for older workers to win in court.
The 5-4 decision reversed a long-standing rule. Many federal appellate courts had decided that if a worker could show age was one of the factors in a layoff or demotion, then the employer was required to prove it had a legitimate reason for its action apart from age.
The court's conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, threw out this two-step approach. Instead, the court said, workers bear the full burden of proving that age was the deciding factor in their dismissal or demotion.
Because workers claiming such discrimination almost certainly will not be present while their employers discuss laying them off or demoting them, analysts said, it will be extremely difficult to obtain hard evidence that age was the key factor.
The last paragraph is crucial in understanding just why this decision is so devastating to elders in the workplace. No employer is going to come right out and say, "You're too old for this job. We need younger people," and the target employee is not likely to be present at the meetings where the action is being set up. Unless a whistle blower steps forward, there is no practical way that the age bias law as it currently stands will ever have any force.
Which is, of course, the point. Our relentlessly corporate-friendly SCOTUS doesn't see any reason why employers should have to follow the law if they don't want to when those laws are laws no conservative govt would have passed. A liberal Democratic pro-worker law? Fuck em if they can't take a joke.
At this rate, the Bush Court is going to go down in history with the Plessy v Ferguson Court, John Yoo, and the legal advisors who told the Romans that the Visigoths had the right to burn their houses if they didn't like the color of the thatch in the roof.
Beyond pathetic. This Court is more criminal than the criminals it's supposed to be judging. Something is seriously fucked up somewhere.
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