A Hawaii Supreme Court justice devoted eight pages of a 91-page criminal opinion to an extraordinary political attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing its conservative majority of racism, comparing its jurisprudence to the *Dred Scott* decision, and declaring that Hawaii's courts will chart their own constitutional course regardless of federal precedent.
Justice Todd Eddins, a Democratic appointee who has served on the Hawaii bench since 2020, authored the majority opinion in *State v. Granillo*, a case involving a man convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman on Maui. The court ordered a new trial after concluding that hair and fiber evidence presented by an FBI expert relied on forensic science that has since been discredited.
That ruling, on its own, would have drawn little national attention. What turned a routine post-conviction case into a legal flashpoint was the sprawling ideological essay Eddins embedded in the opinion, a section that had nothing to do with forensic evidence or the defendant's rights, and everything to do with the justice's grievances against the Supreme Court's conservative majority.
The opinion, as Fox News Digital reported, runs to 91 pages. Roughly eight of those pages amount to a point-by-point indictment of the Roberts Court. Eddins cited *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization*, *Citizens United v. FEC*, *Rucho v. Common Cause*, *Trump v. United States*, and *New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen* as evidence that the federal high court has weakened constitutional protections.
He went further. Eddins accused the Court of adopting a "colorblind" approach to the Equal Protection Clause and drew a direct line between the current majority's originalist methodology and two of the most reviled decisions in American legal history. In the opinion, he wrote:
"The Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857. The work of 1896."
The references are unmistakable. 1954: *Brown v. Board of Education*, which ended school segregation. 1857: *Dred Scott v. Sandford*, which denied citizenship to Black Americans. 1896: *Plessy v. Ferguson*, which upheld racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. Eddins was comparing sitting Supreme Court justices to the authors of those decisions.
He did not stop there. The opinion states plainly:
"The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect."
And this:
"A court that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution."
Eddins framed his broadside not as defiance but as constitutional design. "When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to protect, state constitutions hold the line," he wrote. "That is not defiance. That is the design."
This was not the first time Hawaii's high court has openly rejected federal constitutional precedent. National Review documented a pattern of escalating confrontation, particularly on Second Amendment issues. In *State v. Wilson*, the Hawaii Supreme Court announced it would read the Second Amendment "differently than the current United States Supreme Court", a position so brazen that Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito noted Hawaii had "ignored" the Court's ruling in *Bruen*.
Just weeks before the *Granillo* opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in *Wolford v. Lopez*, striking down Hawaii's so-called "vampire rule", a regulation requiring gun owners to obtain a property owner's permission before carrying a firearm into businesses and other private property open to the public. Justice Alito wrote in that decision that "the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States."
Hawaii's response, delivered through the *Granillo* opinion, was to broaden its defiance well beyond firearms. The nine-page insert, National Review's count, covered voting rights, campaign finance, presidential immunity, abortion, and birthright citizenship. Topics that had nothing whatsoever to do with a 1990 sexual assault conviction on Maui.
The opinion drew sharp rebukes from legal commentators across the spectrum. Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan posted on X:
"The Court issues an unhinged attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. I haven't ever seen something like this. And it's not good."
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, writing on X, described the opinion in blunt terms:
"The Hawaii Supreme Court just issued a truly shocking opinion that unleashed a torrent of rage and recrimination against the majority of the United States Supreme Court, including suggesting that they are de facto racists."
Turley also characterized the opinion as "devoid of judicial restraint and decorum." That phrase captures the central objection: not that a state court interpreted its own constitution independently, states do that routinely, but that a sitting justice used an unrelated criminal case as a vehicle for a political essay accusing the nation's highest court of institutional racism and constitutional sabotage.
The actual legal question in *State v. Granillo* (docket SCWC-22-0000740) had nothing to do with the Roberts Court's approach to equal protection or the Second Amendment. A man was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexual assault. The Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that the FBI expert's hair and fiber evidence relied on forensic methods that have since been discredited. On that basis, the court ordered a new trial.
That is a legitimate exercise of judicial authority. Courts across the country have revisited convictions when the underlying forensic science has been debunked. The question is not whether the Hawaii Supreme Court had grounds to order a new trial. It plainly did.
The question is why Justice Eddins, appointed by former Democratic Gov. David Ige, chose to graft an eight-page political manifesto onto a forensic-evidence case. The New York Post noted that the opinion sparked significant controversy among legal observers who called it unprecedented and inappropriate in both tone and scope.
And the scope is worth pausing on. Eddins wrote:
"The Court overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends. What this Court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawaiʻi's Constitution takes no instruction from it."
Read that again. A state supreme court justice, in an official majority opinion, declared that Hawaii's constitution "takes no instruction" from the U.S. Supreme Court, and justified that position by accusing the federal court of overriding the will of Congress and the people "to serve its own ends."
Eddins called the current Court's originalist majority "hubristic," writing that "today's hubristic originalists use the same method to control modern life." The method he referred to is originalism, the interpretive approach that asks what the Constitution's text meant when it was ratified. It is the method that produced *Bruen*, *Dobbs*, and other decisions that have infuriated progressive legal circles.
State courts have always had the authority to interpret their own constitutions more broadly than federal courts interpret the U.S. Constitution. That is basic federalism. But there is a wide gap between exercising independent state constitutional authority and using an official judicial opinion to accuse the nation's highest court of reviving *Dred Scott*, seeing "only white," and trampling human dignity.
Eddins did not write a scholarly disagreement. He wrote a political indictment, one that borrows the language and posture of progressive activism, not judicial reasoning. And he did it from the bench, in a case that gave him no occasion to do so.
National Review raised an additional question about the opinion's drafting, noting stylistic patterns that prompted speculation about potential AI involvement. That question remains unanswered. What is clear is that the finished product reads less like a judicial opinion and more like an op-ed, one that happens to carry the force of law in Hawaii.
The immediate legal consequence is narrow: a man convicted in 1990 gets a new trial based on discredited forensic evidence. No one is arguing that outcome is unjust.
The broader consequence is the precedent Eddins is trying to set, not a legal precedent, but a cultural one. He is telling the legal left that state courts can serve as institutional resistance to the Supreme Court, and that the way to frame that resistance is by attacking the legitimacy of the federal judiciary itself. By calling the Roberts Court racist. By comparing it to *Dred Scott*. By declaring, in an official opinion, that Hawaii's constitution "takes no instruction" from it.
If a conservative state supreme court justice had written an eight-page essay in a criminal opinion accusing liberal justices of institutional corruption and declaring that his state's constitution owed nothing to federal precedent, the legal establishment would have treated it as a constitutional crisis. The bar associations would have mobilized. The law reviews would have filled with condemnations.
When a progressive justice does it from Honolulu, it gets filed under "bold" or "unprecedented." The double standard is instructive.
Courts derive their authority from the perception that they apply law, not ideology. When a justice uses a criminal case about discredited hair samples to deliver a political speech about the evils of originalism, he does not strengthen his state's constitution. He weakens the institution he sits on.
That is not the design. That is the problem.
