TOO MANY LEFT WING EXTREAMIST

ON THE SUPREME COURT

 

From The New York Post

The supremes order up a crime wave

By HANS VON SPAKOVSKY

It's not often that the murder, rape and assault of American citizens can be tied directly to a court decision. But that's the foreseeable consequence of the Supreme Court's outrageous ruling on Monday in Brown v. Plata.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's order -- joined, unsurprisingly, by his four liberal brethren -- forces California to release 46,000 convicted criminals. It is, as dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia dubbed it, "the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation's history."

Kennedy's dangerous decision is based on the claim that California provides inadequate medical care for its convicts -- care so poor as to violate the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." What's the main cause of this violation? According to the court, prison overcrowding. Thus, it has ordered California to reduce its prison population.

But, as Scalia rightly observes, the majority disregarded the strict limitations of the governing statute (the Prison Litigation Reform Act) as well as "traditional constitutional limitations upon the power of a federal judge, in order to uphold the absurd."

Scalia points out that the court could certainly order the release of an individual prisoner if it found he was denied medical treatment, and release was the only remedy. But that isn't what occurred here.
The court is not ordering the release of prisoners who have received inadequate care. It's ordering the general release of thousands of prisoners who not only haven't suffered from any lack of medical care, but, as Scalia sardonically wrote, "will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym."

It is inconceivable, he added, "that anything more than a small proportion of prisoners . . . have personally received sufficiently atrocious [medical] treatment that their Eighth Amendment right [against cruel and unusual punishment] was violated."

Justice Samuel Alito also dissented, criticizing Kennedy for doing what federal law was intended to prevent. The Constitution, he noted, "does not give federal judges the authority to run state penal systems." Even the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit admitted that the current population level in California prisons does not violate the Constitution.

Rather than issue a court remedy that helps the specific prisoners who have medical problems, Alito thunders, the majority instead has ordered the premature release of "the equivalent of three Army divisions" -- a release "that is very likely to have a major and deleterious effect on public safety."

This expansive view of the judiciary's power lies far outside the boundaries of judicial authority granted by the Constitution. As Alito notes, "It has turned judges into long-term administrators" (as if they are part of the executive branch) of "complex social institutions such as schools, prisons, and police departments."

The lower courts even refused to allow California to introduce more recent evidence of the improvements the state had made in its medical care -- at one point relying on 14-year-old findings. They ignored evidence showing that California has the 13th lowest average mortality rate of all 50 state prison systems.

The courts justified what they did by pointing to deficiencies such as the high vacancy rates in medical and mental-health staff and an "outmoded records-management system." As Alito asks, is it really plausible that such deficiencies could not be remedied without releasing 46,000 dangerous prisoners?

The Supreme Court even approved the absurd finding of the lower courts that releasing these prisoners wouldn't endanger the public -- that it would "actually improve public safety." This is belied by what happened in Philadelphia in the 1990s, when a similar court-imposed cap on the prison population caused the release of thousands of convicts. In the crime wave that ensued, rearrested prisoners who'd benefited from that mass release committed 9,732 new crimes.

What will happen in California as a result of this unprecedented, improvident and foolish order is crystal-clear. As Alito concluded, it "will lead to a grim roster of victims." We can all hope that he is wrong. But as he said, "In a few years, we will see."

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fel low at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org) and a former Justice Department official.