Whatever its other faults, SCOTUS is usually pretty good about not letting crummy defendants blind them to setting good precedent. For example, Miranda warnings came about when they threw out the conviction of a man who had almost certainly kidnapped and raped a teenager.
It doesn't seem strange at all. It's not the Supreme Court's fault that the defendant or plaintiff in any particular case are scummy or sympathetic, nobodies or famous, weak or powerful. They are aware that their decisions will affect many more people.
They need to create law which caters for the for the wrongly accused as much as it does the rightly accused.
Everything you said is actually pretty strange. I'm on board with it, but the default what-humans-try-on-the-first-pass approach is to consider each case on its own merits including the people involved (and runs smack-bang into the various -isms, eg, racism). The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. This system is under constant pressure to revert back to more primitive approaches, where 'good people' get good outcomes and 'bad people' get bad outcomes. It just happens that, in practice, what we have now is better than that.
> Everything you said is actually pretty strange. ... The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice.
This is like a topsy-turvy world. The idea that a scummy or sympathetic defendant would not get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice.
Equal treatment under the law is justice. The only thing that should distinguish a scummy or sympathetic defendant are the __facts__ in their respective cases. Not the law.
By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, it is never really about the defendant—the facts of a case are almost never in dispute—the question is usually a very narrow disagreement over a particular matter of law.
Charitably, this viewpoint misses a great deal of history. Less charitably, it also misses a great deal of what's actually going on right here right now. Poor defendants plea out. Rich defendants don't get charged, because prosecutors know they can afford to go to trial.
Of course I'm not saying that poor people are "scummy", whatever that means. No one in this thread has to say it, because the courts say it every day.
Miranda v. Arizona was decided over 50 years ago. How relevant is the behavior of SCOTUS 50 years ago to predicting their present-day behavior? The membership is completely different, and there have been countless other changes in law and American society and culture over that period. (I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point, which may well be right, but your example might not be the best example to demonstrate it.)
(And especially considering that the present-day SCOTUS has been accused of repeatedly eroding Miranda v. Arizona, see especially Berghuis v. Thompkins in 2010.)
> Miranda v. Arizona was decided over 50 years ago. How relevant is the behavior of SCOTUS 50 years ago to predicting their present-day behavior? The membership is completely different, and there have been countless other changes in law and American society and culture over that period.
Because the Supreme Court is an institution with an institutional culture. Furthermore, its members obsessively study it's past decisions and their reasoning, so I'd expect its culture to have quite a bit of inertia.
There are some disturbing indications that the more conservative current members feel less constrained by traditions and precedent. I don’t have the quotes handy but they were pretty explicit.
