One Judge Has the Guts to Put the Horror of This Supreme Court Term in Context

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/one-judge-supreme-court-horror-show.html?gift_token=v71Z2E3kRRi7wpN7TlPPng

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.

*snip*