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Ala. Justice Parker Attacks Supreme Court
Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker is vexed by the Supreme Court's frequent refusal to follow the U.S. Constitution and he doesn't mind saying so.
Parker is a respected jurist and an ally of gubernatorial candidate and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was thrown off the Court for refusing to obey a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred the state from displaying the Ten Commandments in the state courthouse rotunda. In a recent interview with the Legal Times, Justice Parker spoke about an op-ed he wrote in the Birmingham News, attacking the high court's "blatant judicial tyranny."
Decrying the way the Supreme Court has often ignored the Constitution in making its rulings, Parker told the Legal Times, "Once you cut yourself loose from the text of the Constitution, there is no end." That is what the high court did, he wrote in the News, when the Court's "liberal judges declared last spring in the case of Roper v. Simmons that 'evolving standards of decency' now make it 'unconstitutional' to execute murderers who were minors at the time of their crime." The justices based their ruling not on the original intent or actual language of the United States Constitution but on foreign law, including United Nations treaties.
Story Continues Below "Ironically," he wrote "one of the U.N. treaties invoked by the U.S. Supreme Court as a basis for its Roper decision is a treaty the United States has refused to sign. By insisting that American states submit to this unratified treaty, the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court not only unconstitutionally invalidated laws in 20 states but, to do so, also usurped the treaty-making authority of both the president and the U.S. Senate. "I am not surprised that the liberal activists on the U.S. Supreme Court go to such lengths to usurp more political power," Parker wrote. "I am also not surprised they use such ridiculous reasoning to try and force foreign legal fads on America. After all, this is the same Court that has declared state displays of the Ten Commandments to be unconstitutional."
Justice Parker explained how that ruling caused his own state's Supreme Court to free a vicious killer from death row where a judge and jury had sent him to be executed. In that 1997 case the killer, Renaldo Adams, broke into the home of a pregnant Alabama woman, raped and repeatedly stabbed her, then fled, leaving her to die in a house with three other children. Adams was caught with his hands still covered with the victim's blood.
Wrote Justice Parker, "After a fair trial, Adams was convicted of rape and murder and given the death penalty. It took the jury less than 30 minutes to recommend his execution." Noting that he had to recuse himself when the Adams case came before the Supreme Court because he had helped prosecute Adams, Parker wrote that his fellow Alabama justices freed Adams from death row "not because of any error of our courts but because they chose to passively accommodate - rather than actively resist - the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," in the Roper decision. "State Supreme Court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are precedents," he explained. "After all, a judge takes an oath to support the Constitution - not to automatically follow activist judges who believe their own devolving standards of decency trump the text of the Constitution." Wrote Justice Parker, "I am surprised, and dismayed, that my colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court not only gave in to this unconstitutional activism without a word of protest, but also became accomplices to it by citing Roper as the basis for their decision to free Adams from death row." The proper response to what he called "such blatant judicial tyranny" would have been for the Alabama Supreme Court to refuse to follow the Roper precedent in the Adams case. "By keeping Adams on death row, our Supreme Court would have defended both the U.S. Constitution and Alabama law [thereby upholding their judicial oaths of office] and, at the same time, provided an occasion for the U.S. Supreme Court, with at least two new members, to reconsider the Roper decision." In a parting shot at the high court, Justice Parker wrote that the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court "already look down on the pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity, and other blessings of our great state. We Alabamians will never be able to sufficiently appease such establishment liberals, so we should stop trying and instead stand up for what we believe without apology. "Conservative judges today are on the front lines of the war against political correctness and judicial tyranny. Happily, Alabama’s Supreme Court has a reputation of being one of the most conservative in the nation. However, it does no good to possess conservative credentials if you surrender them before joining the battle."
Editor's note:
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