TheAgitator.com
Huh.
Sunday, February 27th, 2011Which former Supreme Court justice said this:
“If it’s a dope case, I won’t even read the petition. I ain’t giving no break to no dope dealer.”
The surprising answer here.
32 Responses to “Huh.”
Leave a Reply
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
The only rationalization I could attempt to make for such a comment is that he singled out drug dealers (as opposed to drug users). As the letter cited mentions, this seems to stand in stark contrast to Justice Marshall’s work against Jim Crow. However, if we accept the narrative (which may not be true, but is widely held within the black community and elsewhere) that it is not drug users who are the problem but the suppliers, I suppose I could see his viewpoint remaining consistent, even if problematic. If he took such a line as a way of keeping drugs out of the black (and other) community, I can at least understand that position. But if he extended this mindset to any drug case… yea… I don’t get it at all.
Forget for a moment the issue of the war on drugs with regards to this statement. Does anyone else find it surprising that a Supreme Court justice would ever utter a poorly phrased sentence as “I ain’t giving no break to no dope dealer.” I’d expect that from the dope dealer. Even the dealer’s lawyer should have a better grasp of the English language… but a Supreme Court justice? I’m floored.
Marshall prejudged cases. That is the problem.
Perhaps he thought drug dealers damaged and hurt those most vulnerable.
Now sometimes that prejudging resulted in the right result. Sometimes it did not. The lesson here is judges should always have an open mind when hearing a case and reviewing the issues, regardless of their prejudices.
Because the Supreme Court is not a trial court, it is dealing with bigger issues that always transcend one individual result.
All justices do this to an extent. They are human. But they need to recognize that and fight against it.
Portland OR police electrocute those that possess “contempt of cop”. Not even bothering to lie, the cops admit they didn’t follow policy and did so “to gain compliance”.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/02/portland_officers_who_tasered.html
Marshall was a tremendous lawyer and advocate and a terrible, terrible justice.
The link is broken now.
#7 Jason:
Yeah, me too, can’t get to it.
Link is dead.
Re: #2:
I wish I were surprised by the grammar and the sentiment, but I’m not. Marshall showed a really irresponsible, undignified side as a Justice. He even scheduled time into his workdays to watch his favorite soap opera.
P.J. O’Rourke described the three branches of government as “money, television and bullshit.” Watching daytime television when you’re supposed to be adjudicating the weightiest appellate matters of the land sounds like bullshit to me.
Boudreaux deleted the post, which leads me to believe that it’s likely some piece of bullshit that he got in e-mail and posted without vetting it. Oops.
OT But a piece of good news.
http://www.hvpress.net/news/125/ARTICLE/9979/2011-02-09.html
Seems the link is now broken…
The substance of the quote bothers me, but the use of vernacular speech doesn’t. While his record as a justice is controversial, lots of people can speak in the vernacular in some settings, including for effect, while using proper grammar in more formal settings. He apparently said it in an interview, not from the bench or in a written opinion. Again, I don’t like the substance but could not care less about the style.
I find it dissapointing and sad that that recently a sitting Supreme Court Justice would refuse to hear cases purely on the nature of the charges, completely glossing over the very real possibility that the charges could be completely bogus and that a telling and crucial point of law was in contention.
You know, refusing to do his job. But that statement, ‘refusing to do his job’, doesn’t even begin to capture the enormity of what I feel this encompasses.
Justice Thurgood Marshall’s last years on the SUCO were a supreme embarrassment. He was a slobbering senile idiot being carried intellectually by the other eight justices. He was just hanging around collecting his generous paycheck, and trying to out-wait a Republican Administration: Mission Failure.
I’d like to see some context with this quote…
Link busted?
Yeah, the link is broken, but since the word “Marshall” is in the URL I think it’s a safe assumption that it was John Marshall that said it. In fact, the only reason Marshall decided Marbury v. Madison the way he did was because he heard rumors that Marbury frequented opium dens.
Boudreaux deleted the post, which leads me to believe that it’s likely some piece of bullshit that he got in e-mail and posted without vetting it. Oops.
Or you could look the quote up to verify before ignorantly spouting off about someone else’s intentions. I don’t know why Boudreaux took the post down–he notes on his blog that he’s having some technical issues. But the quote is also mentioned and footnoted to page 109 of the Fall 1987 issue of Life in Dan Baum’s book and drug war history, Smoke and Mirrors. It’s also mentioned in a number of other papers and books on drug war history.
Boudreaux deleted the post, which leads me to believe that it’s likely some piece of bullshit that he got in e-mail and posted without vetting it.
According to this book review published in the Yale Law Review, the quote comes from this book published in 1994, so it doesn’t appear to be the product of a hoax email.
Thurgood Marshall, not John Marshall.
ClubMedSux, are you thinking of another case? Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803.
ClubMedSux, are you thinking of another case? Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803.
So I went back and forth about whether a ;-) emoticon was necessary at the end of my John Marshall comment. Apparently it was.
According to the best information I can find, The quote is allegedly from Life Magazine, September 1987 p. 105. , The article is “Justice Revealed”, a piece about the behind-the-scenes action by Donna Haupt and John Neary . There’s no copy of this article online that I can find, although the quote is referenced in some contemporaneous news blurbs.
This quote has been used and referenced in various anti-drug war publications in the intervening years. That doesn’t mean that it’s accurate. I doubt that many of those writers went back to the original 1987 Life Magazine to confirm it.
Still, my allegation of bad faith was hasty and unfair and I withdraw it.
Sometimes spurious quotes make their way into numerous secondary sources, but they are still spurious.
I guessed Marshall…because I think it is in line with about a dozen lengthy interviews I’ve seen with him. I don’t know why anyone would be impressed with him. Came off as a pretty terrible thug.
I doubt that many of those writers went back to the original 1987 Life Magazine to confirm it.
Still, my allegation of bad faith was hasty and unfair and I withdraw it.
So you withdraw one hasty, unfair, allegation for which you have no proof, just after levying another?
Baum, by the way, is a well-respected, left-of-center journalist.
Check this out.
Ginsberg and Scalia are on the dissent side. Booyah!
gee Beav, I didn’t know applying the law and upholding constitutional rights was giving someone a “break”.
Mr. Balko,
All of the bloggers and almost all of the commenters that I have seen responding to this have been taking the quote at face value. I have rarely seen anyone questioning the quote’s accuracy in terms of whether it actually reflects Justice Marshall’s views or record on the drug war.
One commenter to Ed Brayton’s post on this brought up Florida v. Bostick, and I found California v. Greenwood. In those two cases, Justice Marshall cast dissenting votes in favor of the accused in drug cases, writing the dissent for Florida v. Bostick. That right there contradicts Don Bordeaux’s assertion that Justice Marshall had a “practice of automatically siding with the government in every drug case.” (Both cases were decided after the 1987 interview the quote is taken from.)
I have no specific reason to doubt the accuracy of the quote itself, but it is entirely possible that Marshall was being facetious. Without knowing the context, such as what question was asked or what else was being discussed, it is impossible to say one way or the other. I found a video interview with one of the authors and the photographer for the Life article on C-SPAN video – http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ALo . In the part where the author talks about Marshall, she noted how irreverent he could be and mentioned a couple of jokes.
The way that this quote is being passed around the internet could be doing Justice Marshall’s memory a grave injustice. If the original Life article (“Justice Revealed”, part of a special 200th anniverary of the Constitution issue) is unavailable, then, at a minimum, I think that looking at his actual record on drug cases is warranted before accepting the quote at face value rather than as a possible quote mine.