July 2, 2005
On Justice Blackmun ::
books, legal — tagged books, civil rights, legal and SCOTUS
6:04 pm
So, with all the hype surrounding the Supreme Court over the past week (enjoy it now, because it won’t last long), I’ve been somewhat distracted with reading Linda Greenhouse’s Becoming Justice Blackmun, which I thought was just a great book.
While I don’t want to use this space to write a full-blown book review, I wanted to call attention to Justice Blackmun’s dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (the so called “Poor Joshua dissent”). In that case, a young boy named Joshua DeShaney was abused repeatedly by his father. The county social services agency was aware of Joshua’s living conditions, and repeatedly ignored all the signs of his abuse. Ultimately, Joshua’s father injured him so badly that he suffered severe injuries, including profound brain damage that left him mentally retarded.
In the resulting case, a majority of the Supreme Court decided that Joshua and his mother could not bring a suit against the negligent state actors. The majority’s argument—which was as hard-hearted as it sounds—was that the Constitution and Civil Rights laws covered state action, not state inaction. In that now-famous dissent, Blackmun wrote:
It is a sad commentary on upon American life, and constitutional principles—so full of late of patriotic fervor and pround proclamations about “liberty and justice for all—that this child, Joshua DeShaney, now is assigned to live out the entire remainder of his life profoundly retarded. Joshua and his mother, as petitioners here, deserve—but now are denied by this Court—the opportunity to have the facts of their case considered in light of the constitutional protections that [the Civil Rights statute] Section 1983 is meant to provide.
Oh, how the harsh realities of American life continue. In the face of empty patriotism, Justice Blackmun grew to realize the power of the law, and what the courts could—and should—do to protect the most vulnerable members of our society. As we gear up for a the first new appointment of a Supreme Court justice in over a decade, I can only hope that whoever the new nominee is has a journey that is half as signficant as Justice Blackmun’s.
