Supreme
Court:
Nominee
Has
Mixed
But
Mostly
Bad
Record
on
Drug-Related
Issues
11/4/05
By all accounts, Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito is a conservative jurist. A member of the Federalist Society, Alito served in the Reagan administration Justice Department as an assistant to the Solicitor General, then became a drug-fighting US Attorney in New Jersey. Since 1990, he has sat on the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
On criminal justice issues, Alito has consistently come down on the side of police and prosecutors. Perhaps the most searing case was that of Doe v. Groody, where New Jersey police on a drug raid strip searched the wife and 10-year-old daughter of a drug suspect although the search warrant did not specify they were to be searched. The family sued police, and the 3rd Circuit Court, headed by current Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, ruled in favor of the family. Alito dissented, arguing that police had not violated the family's rights. Alito also dissented when the 3rd Circuit ruled state officials had violated defendants' right to a speedy trial, and when his colleagues ruled that a US District Court was authorized to reduce a convict's sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines. Again, he dissented when the 3rd Circuit held that a defendant should be granted habeas corpus because the state had not proved the defendant's intent beyond a reasonable doubt. Neither has Alito proven to be a friend of prisoners. In one case where his colleagues struck down a ban on prisoners in long-term maximum security units from receiving newspapers or magazines, Alito dissented. The ban was within the prison's legal authority, he wrote. On the other hand, if Alito had been sitting on the Supreme Court when it heard the Raich medical marijuana case, there might have been a more favorable outcome. In a case similarly pitting states' rights against federal power under the Commerce Clause (the doctrine used to declare federal supremacy over California's medical marijuana law), Alito again dissented, this time from a majority opinion holding that Congress has the power to ban machine guns. In his dissent, Alito emphasized "the system of constitutional federalism." But while Alito is a conservative, he is no Scalia-style fire-breather, according to those who know him. "Nino [Scalia] is a radical conservative, willing to turn the world upside down to achieve a conservative agenda," former solicitor general Charles Fried, now a Harvard law professor, told the Associated Press. "Sam is a conservative conservative. He would never do something that when it came up you'd say, 'Whoa, where did you get that?'"
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