"Scalia twisted my words"


A LA Times editorial shows that a criminology professor was misquoted
Professor Samuel Walker is not happy with Justice Scalia, as we already knew. But now he is telling the world in a Los Angeles Times editorial.

Scalia quotes my book, "Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in American Criminal Justice," on the point that there has been tremendous progress "in the education, training and supervision of police officers" since the 1961 Mapp decision, which imposed the exclusionary rule on local law enforcement.

My argument, based on the historical evidence of the last 40 years, is that the Warren court in the 1960s played a pivotal role in stimulating these reforms. For more than 100 years, police departments had failed to curb misuse of authority by officers on the street while the courts took a hands-off attitude. The Warren court's interventions (Mapp and Miranda being the most famous) set new standards for lawful conduct, forcing the police to reform and strengthening community demands for curbs on abuse.

Scalia's opinion suggests that the results I highlighted have sufficiently removed the need for an exclusionary rule to act as a judicial-branch watchdog over the police. I have never said or even suggested such a thing. To the contrary, I have argued that the results reinforce the Supreme Court's continuing importance in defining constitutional protections for individual rights and requiring the appropriate remedies for violations, including the exclusion of evidence.

The ideal approach is for the court to join the other branches of government in a multipronged mix of remedies for police misconduct: judicially mandated exclusionary rules, legislation to give citizens oversight of police and administrative reforms in training and supervision. No single remedy is sufficient to this very important task. Hudson marks a dangerous step backward in removing a crucial component of that mix.

This is very important.

Considering that certain Supreme Court justices have recently quoted international law to overturn Constitutional protections, I think this shows that there is an agenda where a little misquoting is acceptable if it is for the "right" reasons.

Hat tip to the Agitator, who finished reading the online edition of the LA Times before I did.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - June 26, 2006 at 01:12 PM  Tag


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