<
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/one-judge-supreme-court-horror-show.html>
"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."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: July 21, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/violetblue/posts/cybersecurity-21-164429612
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
