Summary

Clarence Thomas criticized the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for ignoring Supreme Court precedent in a case involving David Smith, convicted of attempted murder, whose sentence was overturned due to procedural concerns.

Thomas argued the court violated the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act by re-evaluating evidence rather than deferring to previous rulings.

Critics highlighted Thomas’s hypocrisy, noting his role in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, disregarding decades of precedent and leading to abortion bans in over 20 states.

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    I’ve been waiting for this particular bit of brazen hypocrisy.

    By ignoring precedent in order to issue rulings clearly intended to establish precedents, the wholly corrupt and compromised SC effectively guaranteed that sooner or later, they’d have to do this.

    Outside of the warped context of a corrupt and compromised court, it’s actually very simple:

    Either precedent matters, in which case their Roe ruling, their gratuity ruling, their immunity ruling and a number of others are self-evidently flawed, or precedent doesn’t matter, in which case no other court has any duty to consider anything the SC does.

    One or the other.

    • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      They have no intention of being consistent, or uphold the law; it can be both They will soon start shoving their political opponents in jail too.

  • yesman@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    You can never tell with Thomas if he’s been bribed in advance or is soliciting a gratuity.

  • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    (For anyone unfamiliar with Uncle Ruckus, he was an Uncle Tom type character, and a white supremacist)

    • chaotic_altruist@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Only difference is Clarence Thomas gets paid to throw his beliefs out the window, Uncle Ruckus (no relation) did it just for the love of white people.

      Actually now that I think about it, I’m not really sure why Clarence Thomas does the shit he does…

      • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        He was educated in Catholic schools and was going to be a Priest. Thomas has done nothing but uphold the white Christian man’s power and privilege his entire life.

        Had to sit through someone’s gushing fanboy talk about this last year and I nearly threw up. He’s a gross misogynist and fucking smug about it too.

  • MrJameGumb@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Clarence Thomas is a bribe accepting crooked hypocrite who falls to pieces the second the doesn’t get what he wants. How is this news? I thought everyone knew that already?

  • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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    2 days ago

    Am I wrong, or is he just signaling to allies how he will rule if this reaches the Supreme Court…?

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    Thomas’s hypocrisy

    looks at article

    He’s talking about a lower court not following a Supreme Court precedent.

    The Supreme Court is able to overrule Supreme Court precedent in later cases. It happens only rarely, but it does happen. There’s a list of such rulings somewhere I remember on Wikipedia, several pages. Roe v. Wade was one such example.

    But lower courts are not supposed to do that.

    goes looking for Wikipedia page

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_overruled_United_States_Supreme_Court_decisions

    This is a list of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States that have been explicitly overruled, in part or in whole, by a subsequent decision of the Court. It does not include decisions that have been abrogated by subsequent constitutional amendment or by subsequent amending statutes.

    As of 2018, the Supreme Court had overruled more than 300 of its own cases.[1]

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s nuance that doesn’t matter.

      The fact is that this Supreme Court is a joke, and why should anyone respect it in any way?

      He is the one who destroyed the credibility of the court. The precedent that the SC has set is that precedent doesn’t matter. The judge should do what he thinks is fair. He shouldn’t be bound by rules that very clearly don’t bind anyone else, including the fifth district court.

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, as deliciously ironic as it is that it was Thomas who was tasked with this, lower courts are supposed to rule based on precedent, and if anybody is going to overturn that precedent, it needs to be SCOTUS. Now, back in the day that would be done to overturn bullshit like Dred Scott v Sandford or Pace v Alabama once people finally got their heads far enough out of their assholes.

      This court? Not so much.