The Supreme Court of the United States has always had a certain distinction. It is known for making decisions that upset some people.
Decisions that let blacks go to white schools at a time when that was unthinkable, or decisions that gave women the right to choose abortion when many think it is murder. These decisions are the product of the most mystical branch of the U.S. government.
While not able to actually create policy in the formal sense, the high court's decisions are often followed as law. The Supreme Court is the only branch of power that doesn't really get its actions directly checked by either congress or the president. In fact, the only ways for a decision by the Supreme Court to be overruled is to have the same body reverse the decision at a later time or by a Constitutional amendment. I imagine that power like that might go to a justice's head, and some think it has.
Last week, in a statement so bold that it made jaws drop from Los Angeles to the Vatican, Justice Antonin Scalia called for the resignation of all Catholic judges. It is his contention that holding a belief against the death penalty makes a judge unable to perform his or her task.
The Pope has long been an active voice against the use of the death penalty. Hence, the Catholic Church has a very strict stance opposing capital punishment, calling its members to disavow the act. Therein lays Justice Scalia's motivation for his call of Catholic resignation.
Thirty-seven states use the death penalty today. How can a judge who is Catholic and opposed to the death penalty, properly carry out the law? He or she could not, and that is the point.
Resist the easy and lazy temptation to view this simply as a question of whether or not the death penalty is right or wrong. What Scalia presupposes is something much deeper than that. To take this as a capital-punishment-good-or-bad case is to miss the big picture.
In effect Scalia is claiming that individuals who maintain any predisposed beliefs that could in someway handicap their execution of the law should quit. Not step down from a case in context, but completely quit all together.
Defense attorneys are not objective, nor are prosecuting attorneys for that matter. In any given case there will be one of each, both taking the same set of events and actions and creating a different reality for whatever side they are representing. The only impartiality that exists in a courtroom sits behind the bench. There is no room for personal bias in the courtrooms on the behalf of those making the calls. The best I can do to demonstrate that to you is to look to the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson wherein the court claimed "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." This decision was a result of a judge's personal prejudice, not a result of objectivity.
Should all Catholics who stand with the Church on the view of capital punishment be made to resign? No, they should not have to be made to; they should do it on their own will. Just as anyone else who holds beliefs that are in direct conflict with the execution, no pun intended, of the mandated law should also abstain.
Is all this to say that the justice department should only employ agnostic individuals that have no opinion about anything? No. What this is saying is that a judge should not hold beliefs that stifle law. That is that no judge should be in practice if he knows that he is incapable of acting in the way in which the law requires him to behave on the basis of his personal beliefs. That is only fair, and fairness is the goal of justice.
Rob Jones is a political science junior. Reach him at robert.jones@asu.edu.