![]() ![]() And the most freighted context of all is abortion. In other words, a Supreme Court case is not a laboratory experiment, and science does not reside on the Court’s docket in a vacuum. The dispute in this Texas death penalty case thus has profound implications across the Supreme Court’s docket, whenever the justices are faced with deciding what weight to give a claim based on science compared with the weight of a claim grounded in precedent or in the deference owed to Congress or a state legislature. This was a fascinating objection: not that the current medical standards were incorrect or incapable of consistent application, but that outside a particular constitutional context, they were simply irrelevant. The Court, however, interprets that constitutional guarantee as turning on clinical guidelines that do not purport to reflect standards of decency.” 3 In his dissenting opinion, which Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined, Chief Justice John Roberts objected that the definition of “cruel and unusual” punishment – a punishment that thus violates the Eighth Amendment – must rest “on a judicial judgment about societal standards of decency, not a medical assessment of clinical practice.” The chief justice continued: “The Eighth Amendment, under our precedent, is supposed to impose a moral backstop on punishment, prohibiting sentences that our society deems repugnant. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion canvased the current medical approach, relying in part on a brief filed by the American Psychological Association that described contemporary understanding and practice. The Supreme Court overturned the death sentence. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the inadequacy of that measure in her majority opinion, it relied on “lay perceptions of intellectual disability” long superseded by “improved understanding over time.” 2 Upholding the death sentence for a man with IQ scores in the 70s and adaptive-functioning test scores more than two standard deviations below the mean, the state court instead employed a guideline from a 1992 opinion of its own. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had rejected the definitional approach to intellectual disability currently used in the medical community. Justice Scalia was no longer alive when, during its 2016 term, the Court considered the question of how courts should measure intellectual disability, for purposes of deciding whether a capital defendant should be deemed so disabled as to be constitutionally ineligible to be put to death. What sort of “belief” in molecular biology was he lacking? (Or, by the same token, on what beliefs regarding other subjects on the Supreme Court’s docket was he content to rely without question?) This was surely an odd expression of insecurity from the ordinarily self-confident justice. Myriad Genetics. He explained: “I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief.” 1 “I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion” except for those sections describing “fine details of molecular biology,” Justice Scalia wrote in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Justice Antonin Scalia made that quite clear in a one-paragraph opinion concurring in the Court’s unanimous 2013 decision on the patentability of sequences in the human genome: in this case, genetic mutations that increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Science and the Supreme Court of the United States are uneasy partners. Evidence-based law met evidence-based medicine in a decision that demonstrated a new willingness by the Court to insist on good science in the area of abortion, and perhaps beyond. Hellerstedt, decided in June 2016, the Court invalidated one such effort, a Texas law, on the ground that the claimed health benefits were insufficient to justify the predictably massive shrinkage of the medical infrastructure necessary for women to be able to exercise their constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. ![]() In recent years, states wishing to curb access to abortion have claimed health justifications for placing novel and onerous restrictions on abortion providers. The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence offers a particularly interesting and consequential example of the Court’s encounter with science: a prolonged encounter, since from the beginning, the Court viewed women’s claim to reproductive freedom through a medicalized lens. The justices approach science not in the abstract, of course, but from within the doctrinal area in which the particular dispute arises, whether intellectual property, criminal law, or the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. When it comes to science and technology, Supreme Court justices resemble lay people in robes, often ill-equipped to grasp fully the implications of the important cases they are asked to decide on scientific subjects. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |