Winds of Change by Linda Greenhouse
Back in 1991, the Supreme Court upheld a Michigan man’s prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole for possessing more than 1.5 pounds of cocaine. The sentence did not represent the third strike of a three-strikes law: the prisoner, Ronald A. Harmelin, 45, had no previous criminal record. The police found the drugs when they stopped him for running a red light. Since simple possession was enough to trigger Michigan’s mandatory life-without-parole sentence, the prosecution didn’t even have to bother trying to prove that Mr. Harmelin intended to sell the cocaine.
In upholding the sentence, the court rejected the argument that it was so disproportionate to the crime as to violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The three justices who then occupied the middle of the court (yes, there was a multi-justice middle back then) — Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David H. Souter — voted with the 5-to-4 majority.
In “Five Chiefs,” the very interesting (and underappreciated) Supreme Court memoir he published in retirement, Justice John Paul Stevens reflected on the Harmelin decision, from which he dissented. Those three justices were all relatively new to the court at the time, he wrote. The justices they had replaced — Lewis F. Powell Jr., Potter Stewart and William J. Brennan Jr. — were all long-serving veterans who Justice Stevens speculated would have voted to invalidate the sentence. It may be, he added, that “the views of individual justices become more civilized after 20 years of service on the court.” . . .
Something is clearly in the wind. I’ve also been thinking about the New York City mayoral primary. It’s impossible to read the election outcome as other than, at least in part, a public repudiation of the Bloomberg administration’s law-enforcement policies, particularly the administration’s embrace of stop-and-frisk. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg not only denounced Federal District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin’s ruling last month that stop-and-frisk as the police were using it was unconstitutional, but he also attacked the judge herself as an “ideologically driven” judicial activist.
Unlike the days when politicians could score easy points by attacking courts as soft on crime, however, the mayor got no traction.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/winds-of-change/?hp&_r=0
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