blackprof.com: More on Alito on Civil Rights

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A reader commented in response to my last post, that I should also check out Judge Alito's decisions in U.S. Kithcart, 134 F.3d 521 and Williams v. Price, 343 F.3d 2233 (2003). Because both these cases were cited in a front page article in today's Washington Post about Alito's civil rights record (here's a question Paul Butler: do the editors of the Post read blackprof?), and because the cases have been cited as evidence that Alito is not hostile to civil rights, I thought I'd share my review of those cases.

My initial reaction is that these cases are not "exculpatory," in the sense that they do not establish civil rights bona fides for Judge Alito. In Kithcart, Alito, writing for the majority, does reverse a district court judge's decision not to grant a motion to suppress evidence by a black criminal defendant. The defendant argued that the police did not have "probable cause" to arrest and search him and his friend. The police stopped the defendant based on a description of robbery suspects as "two black men in a black sportscar." Alito says this was simply not enough to establish "probable cause" to arrest and search the defendant. But Alito does remand the case back to the court below, with instruction for the court to determine whether the officers had "reasonable suspicion" to stop the two black men -- a less demanding standard. Again, Judge Theodore McKee (with whom Alito disagreed in the Bray case I mentioned in an earlier post) dissents from this part of Alito's decision. McKee agrees that there was no probable cause. But he contends that the same evidence showing that there was no probable cause to stop and search the black men in this case supported that there was no reasonable suspicion either. McKee, with painstaking detail, goes through the evidence in the record and through the district court's findings to support his dissenting view on this point. Again, the difference in the way these two justices construe the evidence in the record is quite stark.

Likewise in Williams v. Price, 343 F.3d 223 (3d Cir. 2003) Judge Alito does vacate a district court order denying a petition for writ of habeus corpus to a black defendant serving a life sentence for murder. The defendant charged that his right to an impartial jury was violated when the state court refused to hear evidence in a post-trial hearing that jurors has made racist statements during sentencing deliberations and during the course of the trial. Alito remanded the case on the grounds that the trial court should hear testimony relating to racist statements allegedly made by one of the jurors in the hallway of the courthouse in the presence of a defense witness during the trial. The defendant argued that these statements proved that several of the jurors lied during the pre-trial voir dire when they said that they could give a black person's testimony as much credibility as a white person. But with regard to the most egregious testimony offered by one juror -- that other jurors called her an "n-lover" and taunted, "I hope your daughter marries one of them" --Judge Alito found that the exclusion of those statements was not irrational and "not an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law" because they occurred during jury deliberations which are in general not subject to review. Judge Alito declined to find that a juror's testimony about racial bias on the part of other jurors falls into the narrow exception of matters which can impeach a jury verdict. Just to make it fun and more complex, he's joined in this majority opinion by . . . Judge McKee!

My point is that these two cases alone, given their complexity and Alito's partial grant of relief to the black defendants, cannot counterbalance what is a mounting set of troubling decisions in civil rights cases. But I'm still reading . . .

-Sherrilyn

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