A Hawaii Supreme Court justice used a criminal case ruling to deliver a sweeping, politically charged attack on the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, accusing the conservative majority of racism, democratic backsliding, and constitutional betrayal, while declaring that Hawaii's courts will refuse to follow the high court's lead on interpreting state constitutional rights.

Justice Todd Eddins, appointed by former Democratic Gov. David Ige in 2020, authored a 91-page majority opinion in State v. Granillo that ordered a new trial for a man convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman on Maui. The legal basis for overturning the conviction was narrow: hair and fiber evidence presented by an FBI expert at the original trial relied on forensic science that has since been discredited.

But Eddins did not stop there. Roughly eight pages of the opinion, a section with no apparent connection to the forensic-evidence question, were devoted to a blistering denunciation of the Roberts court's jurisprudence, ranging from voting rights and gun laws to campaign finance and presidential immunity. The result is an opinion that reads less like a judicial ruling and more like a political manifesto.

Comparing Roberts court to Dred Scott and Plessy

The most incendiary passages in the opinion draw a direct line between the current Supreme Court majority and two of the most reviled decisions in American legal history. Eddins wrote:

"The Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857. The work of 1896."

The references are unmistakable. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended racial segregation in public schools. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) denied citizenship to Black Americans. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. Eddins is accusing six sitting Supreme Court justices of carrying forward the legacy of slavery-era and Jim Crow-era rulings.

He went further, writing that "the Roberts Court sees only white" and "refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect." He called the court's originalist justices "hubristic" and accused them of using constitutional interpretation "to control modern life."

The opinion specifically targeted several landmark decisions by name: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Citizens United v. FEC, Rucho v. Common Cause, Trump v. United States, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In Eddins' telling, each represents an expansion of government and corporate power at the expense of individual rights, a characterization that conservative legal scholars would vigorously contest.

Eddins wrote that the court "overrides what Congress passed" and "overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends." He declared that Hawaii's constitution "takes no instruction" from the Roberts court, framing state-level defiance as a feature of the constitutional design, not a bug:

"When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to protect, state constitutions hold the line. That is not defiance. That is the design."

Legal observers call the opinion unprecedented

The reaction from legal professionals was swift and pointed. Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan called the opinion an "unhinged attack" on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, posting on X:

"The Court issues an unhinged attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. I haven't ever seen something like this. And it's not good."

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley described the opinion as "devoid of judicial restraint and decorum." He posted on X that the Hawaii Supreme Court "just issued a truly shocking opinion that unleashed a torrent of rage and recrimination against the majority of the United States Supreme Court, including suggesting that they are de facto racists."

Turley's characterization cuts to the heart of the problem. Whatever one thinks of the Roberts court's direction, a state supreme court opinion is not a law review article, a political speech, or an op-ed. It is a binding legal document. Embedding eight pages of ideological grievance into a post-conviction ruling about discredited forensic evidence raises serious questions about judicial temperament and the proper role of the bench.

The tensions between the Hawaii Supreme Court and the nation's highest court have been building. Chief Justice Roberts himself has addressed internal court dynamics around the weight of precedent, and the friction between state and federal courts on constitutional interpretation is well-documented.

The Wolford v. Lopez backdrop

The timing of Eddins' opinion is difficult to separate from a recent and significant defeat for Hawaii at the U.S. Supreme Court. Just weeks before the Granillo ruling, the high court struck down Hawaii's so-called "vampire rule" in Wolford v. Lopez, a 6-3 decision. That rule had required gun owners to obtain a property owner's permission before carrying a firearm into businesses and other private property open to the public.

The Wolford decision was the latest in a pattern of rebukes from the U.S. Supreme Court directed at Hawaii's approach to the Second Amendment. National Review noted that the Hawaii court had previously invoked "the spirit of Aloha" to justify restrictions on firearms, writing in an earlier case, State v. Wilson, that the "spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons." Justice Samuel Alito responded in Wolford that "the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States."

That exchange captures the core conflict. The Hawaii Supreme Court has repeatedly signaled that it views certain federal constitutional rights, particularly gun rights, as incompatible with the state's values. Eddins' opinion in Granillo takes that position and expands it into a wholesale rejection of the Roberts court's authority on virtually every front.

The Supreme Court's upcoming docket is packed with cases on firearms, religious liberty, and election law, areas where state courts like Hawaii's may again find themselves at odds with federal precedent.

Defiance dressed as design

Eddins' framing deserves scrutiny. He argues that state constitutions are meant to serve as independent safeguards when the federal courts fall short. That principle has deep roots in American federalism. Conservative jurists have invoked it too, in different contexts.

But there is a difference between interpreting a state constitution to provide broader protections on a specific issue, which state courts have long done, and issuing a blanket declaration that the U.S. Supreme Court's work product is illegitimate, racially motivated, and unworthy of consideration. Eddins' opinion crosses that line.

He wrote that the Roberts court "systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity." He accused its conservative majority of abandoning the people it is "supposed to protect." He likened its equal-protection jurisprudence to the reasoning that upheld slavery and segregation.

These are not legal arguments. They are political accusations, delivered from the bench with the force of a judicial opinion. And they were embedded in a case about forensic hair analysis, a case where the underlying legal question had nothing to do with the Second Amendment, campaign finance, or presidential immunity.

National Review raised an additional question: whether AI tools may have been used to draft portions of the opinion. That question remains unanswered, but the sheer breadth of the opinion's political commentary, covering topics far afield from the case at hand, invites the inquiry.

The broader pattern of friction among justices over constitutional interpretation is not new. Disagreement is healthy. But disagreement expressed through proper channels, dissents, concurrences, scholarly debate, is different from a state court using an unrelated criminal case as a platform to accuse the nation's highest court of institutional racism.

The real cost

Lost in the political fireworks is the actual case. A man convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexual assault on Maui will now receive a new trial, more than three decades later, because the forensic evidence used to convict him has been discredited. That is a serious matter, for the defendant, for the victim, and for the integrity of the justice system.

The legal question was straightforward and important. It deserved a focused, rigorous opinion. Instead, the Hawaii Supreme Court produced a 91-page document in which the actual legal reasoning competes for attention with a political broadside that has nothing to do with the facts of the case.

The rising threats against the judiciary make this kind of rhetoric from the bench even more reckless. When a sitting justice accuses colleagues on the nation's highest court of reviving the legacy of Dred Scott and Plessy, he is not just making a legal argument. He is pouring fuel on a fire that responsible jurists should be working to contain.

Justice Eddins called his stance "not defiance" but "the design." Legal observers can read the opinion for themselves and decide whether eight pages of political invective, inserted into a forensic-evidence case, look more like constitutional fidelity or judicial activism with a grudge.

When judges start writing political speeches from the bench and calling it law, the people who pay the price are the ones who still expect courts to act like courts.