Hawaii Supreme Court justice turns criminal case ruling into political broadside against Roberts court

A Hawaii Supreme Court justice used a criminal case opinion to launch an extended political attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the conservative majority of racism, dismantling democratic institutions, and reviving the legal reasoning of the Dred Scott era, then declared that Hawaii's constitution "takes no instruction" from the nation's highest court.

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 court found that hair and fiber evidence presented by an FBI expert at the original trial relied on forensic science that has since been discredited.

That legal question, whether bad forensic evidence warrants a new trial, could have been resolved in far fewer pages. Instead, as Fox News Digital reported, Eddins devoted roughly eight pages of the opinion to a sweeping denunciation of the Roberts court, its conservative justices, and several of its most consequential recent rulings.

Eight pages of grievance in a forensics case

The opinion reads less like a judicial ruling and more like a progressive manifesto dropped into the middle of a criminal appeal. Eddins argued that Hawaii's courts should refuse to look to the Roberts court when interpreting the state constitution, and he listed the decisions he finds objectionable: 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.

Those cases cover abortion, campaign finance, partisan gerrymandering, presidential immunity, and Second Amendment rights. Together, they represent the core of the conservative legal project over the past decade and a half. Eddins treated them not as legitimate exercises of judicial interpretation but as evidence that constitutional protections have been systematically weakened.

Then he went further. Eddins compared the current court's approach to the Equal Protection Clause to two of the most reviled decisions in American legal history:

"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. The year 1954 is Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in public schools. The year 1857 is Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship to Black Americans. And 1896 is Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. Eddins placed the Roberts court in the company of the worst constitutional failures in the nation's history.

He did not stop there. The opinion accused the Roberts court of adopting a "colorblind" approach to equal protection, and framed that approach as itself a form of racial blindness:

"The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect."

Defiance dressed up as federalism

Eddins attempted to cast his critique as something other than a state court openly repudiating the authority of the federal judiciary. His framing leaned on state constitutional sovereignty, the idea that Hawaii's founding document provides broader protections than the federal Constitution and that state courts are free to interpret their own charters independently.

"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."

But the substance of the opinion undermines the framing. Eddins did not merely argue that Hawaii can offer greater protections under its own constitution, a principle that is well established and unremarkable. He argued that the U.S. Supreme Court itself is illegitimate in its reasoning, racist in its orientation, and hostile to democratic governance. That is not a federalism argument. That is a political one.

The opinion's most sweeping passage made the point explicit. Eddins wrote that the Roberts court "overrides what Congress passed" and "overrides what the people chose," all "to serve its own ends." He concluded:

"What this Court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawaiʻi's Constitution takes no instruction from it."

And in another passage, he described the court he was repudiating in terms no sitting justice has used in modern memory:

"A court that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution."

The Supreme Court's recent landmark rulings have drawn criticism from the left before. But that criticism has come from politicians, activists, and law professors, not from a sitting state supreme court justice writing in an official majority opinion.

Legal observers push back

The reaction from legal commentators was swift and pointed. Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan posted on X that the opinion amounted to an attack on the legitimacy of the nation's highest court:

"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 offered a similar assessment. Turley wrote on X that the opinion was unprecedented in its hostility:

"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 described the opinion as devoid of judicial restraint and decorum. That characterization is hard to dispute when a state court opinion devoted to a forensic-evidence question in a decades-old criminal case takes an eight-page detour to call the Roberts court the heir of Dred Scott.

The concern raised by Wessan and Turley is not abstract. When a state supreme court justice writes, in an official opinion joined by a majority of the bench, that the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings are illegitimate and that the state constitution "takes no instruction" from the federal judiciary, that language has consequences. It signals to lower courts, to state officials, and to the public that compliance with federal constitutional interpretation is optional, a matter of political agreement rather than legal obligation.

That kind of reasoning has surfaced in other contexts recently. Even some Democrats have warned that pledges to defy the Supreme Court invite a constitutional crisis.

The timing and the gun case

The opinion's timing adds another dimension. Just weeks before Eddins issued the Granillo ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Wolford v. Lopez in a 6-3 decision, striking down Hawaii's so-called "vampire rule", a state law that required gun owners to obtain a property owner's permission before carrying a firearm into businesses and other private property open to the public.

That decision was a direct rebuke to Hawaii's gun regulations and a practical application of the Bruen framework that Eddins singled out for criticism. The sequence is hard to ignore: the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Hawaii gun law, and weeks later a Hawaii Supreme Court justice used an unrelated criminal case to declare that the Roberts court's interpretation of the Constitution should carry no weight in Hawaii.

Eddins labeled the conservative justices "hubristic originalists" who "use the same method to control modern life", a characterization that applies directly to the originalist reasoning in Bruen and Wolford. Whether the Wolford decision motivated the eight-page critique is a question Eddins did not address. But the timing speaks for itself.

Justice Gorsuch has defended the Court's deliberative process and pushed back on claims that the institution is broken. The Eddins opinion represents the opposite posture, not engagement with the Court's reasoning, but wholesale rejection of its legitimacy.

The case underneath the polemic

Lost in the political commentary is the actual criminal case. A man identified as Granillo was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman on Maui. The Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that the hair and fiber evidence presented at trial by an FBI expert relied on forensic methods that have since been discredited, and it ordered a new trial.

That is a serious legal question with real consequences for both the defendant and the victim. Forensic science standards have evolved significantly since 1990, and courts across the country have grappled with how to handle convictions that rested on methods now considered unreliable.

But Eddins chose to use this case, a case involving a violent crime against a woman, as the vehicle for a political broadside against the Supreme Court. The eight pages devoted to attacking the Roberts court have nothing to do with hair and fiber evidence, nothing to do with the defendant's rights, and nothing to do with the victim's interest in justice. They are a political statement inserted into a judicial opinion, and they will now be cited, shared, and debated entirely apart from the case they were supposed to resolve.

The Supreme Court's current docket is full of complex cases that demand careful legal reasoning. What the Eddins opinion offers instead is grievance masquerading as jurisprudence.

What this reveals

State courts have always had the authority to interpret their own constitutions more broadly than the federal Constitution. That principle is not in dispute. What Eddins did is something different. He did not simply apply Hawaii's constitution to reach a different result than the U.S. Supreme Court might have reached. He used an official judicial opinion to accuse the Roberts court of racism, to compare it to the courts that upheld slavery and segregation, and to declare that Hawaii's legal system should treat the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretations as illegitimate.

That is not federalism. It is nullification dressed in judicial robes.

And it raises a question that the opinion itself does not answer: if a state supreme court can declare the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings illegitimate on the basis of political disagreement, what exactly is the limiting principle? Which rulings does Hawaii intend to follow, and which will it discard? Who decides, and on what basis?

Eddins wrote that his position "is not defiance." The eight pages that follow say otherwise.

When judges start writing political manifestos into their opinions, they aren't protecting the constitution. They're abandoning the one thing that makes their authority worth respecting: the discipline to set politics aside and follow the law.