Random Case...Random Dissent
So the Supreme Court votes 6 to 3 on a case. The three dissenting votes come from Chief Justice Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Clarence Thomas.
So why is Bill Lockyer not smiling? Because.
People who smoke marijuana because their doctors recommend it to ease pain can be prosecuted for violating federal drug laws, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, overriding medical marijuana statutes in 10 states.
The court's 6-3 decision was filled with sympathy for two seriously ill California women who brought the case, but the majority agreed that federal agents may arrest even sick people who use the drug as well as the people who grow pot for them.
Justice John Paul Stevens, an 85-year-old cancer survivor, said the court was not passing judgment on the potential medical benefits of marijuana, and he noted "the troubling facts" in the case. However, he said the Constitution allows federal regulation of homegrown marijuana as interstate commerce....
In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the court's "overreaching stifles an express choice by some states, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently."...
The ruling does not strike down California's law, or similar ones in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. However, it may hurt efforts to pass laws in other states because the federal government's prosecution authority trumps states' wishes.
John Walters, director of national drug control policy, defended the government's ban. "Science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective," he said.
California's law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation....
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Monday that "people shouldn't panic ... there aren't going to be many changes."
Local and state officers handle nearly all marijuana prosecutions and must still follow any state laws that protect patients.
O'Connor was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. While conservatives may not necessarily support medical marijuana, they have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years.
O'Connor, who like Rehnquist has had cancer, said she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use."
Thomas said the ruling was so broad "the federal government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives and potluck suppers throughout the 50 states."...
Opinion here (Gonzales v. Reich).
My objection to California's medical marijuana initiative was a much lower level thing - basically, the establishment of two classes of control for medicines. If I want to buy some ibuprofen in California, I have to find a manufacturer that has been specifically approved by several government agencies within the U.S. It's not good enough if a government in Canada approves it; it has to be an agency in the U.S. Meanwhile, if my doctor writes me a prescription for marijuana, I can get it anywhere I like, whether it includes pesticides or whatever else. Why the different standards, I asked. However, the majority of participating California voters weren't concerned.
Incidentally, this isn't the first Clarence Thomas dissent that can be characterized as "pro drug":
Justice Thomas wrote the dissent on CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS v. EDMOND on Nov 28, 2000:
Indianapolis operates vehicle checkpoints on its roads in an effort to interdict unlawful drugs. Mr. Edmond was stopped at such a checkpoint, and filed suit, claiming that the roadblocks violated the Fourth Amendment’s rule that a search or seizure is unreasonable absent individualized suspicion of wrongdoing....
Dissent:
(Rehnquist, joined by Scalia & Thomas)
The State’s use of a drug-sniffing dog, according to the Court’s holding, annuls what is otherwise plainly constitutional under our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: brief, standardized, discretionless, roadblock seizures of automobiles, seizures which effectively serve a weighty state interest with only minimal intrusion on the privacy of their occupants. Because these seizures serve the State’s accepted and significant interests of preventing drunken driving and checking for driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations, and because there is nothing in the record to indicate that the addition of the dog sniff lengthens these otherwise legitimate seizures, I dissent.
Additional dissent:
(Thomas)
I am not convinced [the original drunk-driving & immigration roadblock cases] were correctly decided. I rather doubt that the Framers would have considered “reasonable” a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing. But Mr. Edmond did not advocate the overruling [of the original cases, so I join in the dissent].
However, Thomas feels slightly differently if a school is involved:
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the 10th Circuit's decision and upheld the policy. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas cast this case as a logical extension of Vernonia.
First, he contrasted the law governing searches by law enforcement officers with searches of students conducted by school employees. In ordinary cases, law enforcement officers must have a search warrant and probable cause to conduct a search. As Thomas explained, the Fourth Amendment holds school searches to a lower, more flexible standard: A school employee does not need a search warrant to search a student, and a school search is "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment if the employee has an "articulable suspicion" that the search will reveal contraband or a violation of a law or school rule.
Thomas rejected the argument of Lindsay and Daniel that school searches always require "individualized suspicion" of wrongdoing by the particular student to be searched. He wrote that individualized suspicion might not be necessary if "special needs" justify a school search....
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