Mother Jones
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Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has referenced Dr. Seuss to get her point across during oral arguments. Justice Stephen Breyer on Monday drew an analogy to his grandson making excuses to avoid doing homework. Rhetorical devices take all kinds of forms on the bench. But Sonia Sotomayor might be the first justice in recent memory to invoke her own relatives in jail to make a point.
During oral arguments on Monday morning in Foster v. Chatman, a case involving racial discrimination in jury selection, Sotomayor questioned whether a Georgia prosecutor had used a bogus pretext to bounce an African American woman from a jury. The prosecutor had claimed he excused her because the woman’s cousin had been arrested on a drug charge. “There’s an assumption that she has a relationship with this cousin,” Sotomayor told Georgia deputy attorney general Beth Burton, who argued Georgia’s case before the court. “I have cousins who I know have been arrested, but I have no idea where they’re in jail. I hardly—I don’t know them…Doesn’t that show pretext?”
Her comments demonstrate the importance of her role as the first Latina justice on the court, an institution dominated by white men from privileged backgrounds. She asked the sort of question African Americans might welcome from Clarence Thomas, the only black justice, who rarely speaks from the bench. The insights she brings from her formative years in a Bronx public housing project are particularly applicable to racially charged cases like this one.
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Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Invokes Jailed Relatives to Highlight Racism in Jury Selection
