Charles P Pierce: Justice Sotomayor's words on racial injustice before you go to sleep tonight
Madame Justice Sotomayor, writing in dissent, cranked up the Enola Gay.
She summoned up the "suspicionless stops" which were characteristic of Jim Crow law-enforcement. After she paid decent fealty to the universality of Fourth Amendment protections, she made it quite clear that a lot of this is About Race, even though nothing ever is About Race. She even talked about how, sometimes, when people of color are stopped without cause, those people end up being dead.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-1373_83i7.pdf
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are "isolated." They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner's Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a46027/sotomayor-dissent/
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