The big interview on “60 Minutes” last week with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was billed as an opportunity to get to know the man about whom we know very little.
Interviewer Steve Kroft and Thomas painted a picture of the justice’s humble beginnings: He grew up fatherless in a shack that had no electricity or plumbing in the isolated backwaters of the rural South and later in a squalid tenement. Thomas’ mother eventually sent him and his brother to live with their grandfather, a hardworking man but tightfisted in the way of doling out money, compassion and compliments.
Thomas said he is misunderstood (primarily by African-Americans) because his views (primarily on affirmative action) don’t align with those of other blacks. It’s not merely conservatism that trips some of us up. It’s his dearth of compassion.
If we want a glimpse into the real Thomas, we don’t have to read his memoir. We should examine his Supreme Court record. In doing so, we don’t have to go back to 1991, when he joined the court, or only look at cases on affirmative action, sex discrimination or abortion.
We can look at Bowles vs. Russell, a case on which he wrote the majority opinion in June.
Keith Bowles, an Ohio inmate convicted of murder, had one chance to get a federal appeals court to correct what he said were errors that led to his conviction and a sentence of 15 years to life in prison.
But his lawyer inadvertently filed for an appeal two days after the statutory deadline. It wasn’t Bowles’ lawyer’s fault. He actually filed one day before the deadline given by a federal district judge. The judge figured out he had messed up and let the process move forward. But the federal appeals court wasn’t so forgiving and threw it out.
The Supreme Court — in a rare opinion penned by Thomas — ruled that the appeals court was right. Thomas wrote that Bowles’ appeal must be dismissed because the deadlines are “jurisdictional in nature” and cannot be waived. It doesn’t matter that the mix-up was the result of a judge’s error.
Is this about a deadline or a man’s life? Certainly there are times when adhering to the strict construction of the law is necessary. This was not one of them. The justices could have used their discretion under something called “unusual circumstances.”
In dissenting, Justice David Souter said it was “intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way and there is not even a technical justification for condoning this bait and switch.” He was right. The ruling was mean-spirited and unnecessary.
More Top Picks Best Blue Light Glasses Under 100
There are other examples that shine a light on the real Thomas. He was one of three dissenters in a decision finding that executing the mentally retarded was “cruel and unusual punishment.” He also dissented in an Alabama case in which the majority found that chaining prisoners to outdoor hitching posts — and not allowing them to eat, drink or relieve themselves — was also “cruel and unusual.”
Thomas’ rationale was that the hitching post served “a legitimate … purpose” that brought prisoners in “compliance with prison rules while out on work duty.”
Indeed, Thomas was not the only one to engage in this insanity. In the Bowles case, he wrote the opinion on behalf of four other justices.
I focus on Thomas because apparently the reason for writing the memoir is that he wants us to know more about him. But it’s his record, not the memoir, that is far more telling.
(Still, we can glean something from the memoir: He is still quite angry about Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment and about having had a “set-aside” seat in Yale Law School. Interestingly, though, he wasn’t so philosophically put off that he would forgo joining the Supreme Court or stop using Yale on his resume.)
It would seem that someone with such humble beginnings, who grew up in the Jim Crow South and used “Colored Only” bathrooms, might be imbued with a unique sense of justice. One would expect Thomas to have a little more compassion with his conservatism.
Yet he rules as though he has neither a recollection nor a connection to his past. And now he wants to trot it out in a memoir. All things considered, he may as well have grown up in an ivory tower.
———-