A Hawaii Supreme Court justice used a 91-page opinion overturning a decades-old criminal conviction to launch an extended attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the conservative majority of racism, dismantling democratic institutions, and reviving the legal reasoning of the Dred Scott era. The opinion declared that Hawaii's courts will not look to the Roberts Court when interpreting the state constitution.
Justice Todd Eddins, appointed in 2020 by former Democratic Gov. David Ige, authored the majority opinion in State v. Granillo, which ordered a new trial for a man convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman on Maui. The legal basis for the new trial was narrow: an FBI expert had presented hair and fiber evidence that relied on forensic science since discredited. That question could have been resolved in far fewer pages.
Instead, Eddins devoted roughly eight pages of the opinion to a sweeping denunciation of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, a section that had nothing to do with hair samples, forensic reliability, or the rights of the defendant. Fox News Digital reported on the opinion's sharp tone and the backlash it drew from legal observers across the country.
The language in the Eddins opinion reads less like judicial reasoning and more like a political manifesto. The justice wrote that the Roberts Court "sees only white" and "refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect." He compared the current Court's work not to any modern legal dispute but to the darkest chapters in American judicial history.
Eddins wrote in the opinion:
"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."
Those years correspond to Brown v. Board of Education, which ended school segregation; Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship to Black Americans; and Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. The implication is unmistakable: Eddins equated the current Supreme Court's jurisprudence with two of the most reviled decisions in American legal history.
The opinion went further, cataloging grievances across a wide range of issues. As National Review detailed, the digression spanned voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, and birthright citizenship, a sweep so broad it bore no connection to the forensic-evidence question the case actually presented.
Eddins described the Court's originalist justices as "hubristic" and accused them of overriding the will of Congress and the American people. He 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."
The opinion also declared that Hawaii's state constitution would serve as a firewall against federal constitutional interpretation, framing this not as defiance but as design. Eddins wrote: "When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to protect, state constitutions hold the line. That is not defiance. That is the design."
The opinion did not arrive in a vacuum. Just weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court handed Hawaii a significant defeat in Wolford v. Lopez, striking down the state's so-called "vampire rule", a law requiring gun owners to obtain property owner permission before carrying firearms into businesses open to the public. The ruling came down 6-3, and it clearly stung. The Supreme Court's Second Amendment victory in that case reinforced that the Bill of Rights applies uniformly across all fifty states, regardless of local sentiment.
National Review noted that Justice Samuel Alito, writing in Wolford, stated: "The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States" and "cannot give way to the spirit of Aloha in Hawaii." That line may help explain the intensity of Eddins' response, though it does not justify turning an unrelated criminal appeal into a vehicle for institutional grievance.
The Eddins opinion specifically cited Bruen, the landmark 2022 Second Amendment case, alongside Dobbs (abortion), Citizens United (campaign finance), Rucho v. Common Cause (gerrymandering), and Trump v. United States (presidential immunity). Each was invoked as evidence of what Eddins called a Court that "systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity."
That is a remarkable list of accusations to embed in a ruling about discredited hair evidence from 1990.
The reaction from the legal community was swift and pointed. 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 offered a similarly sharp assessment, writing on X that the opinion "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 described the opinion as devoid of judicial restraint and decorum.
Neither characterization is difficult to understand after reading the excerpts. When a state supreme court justice writes that the nation's highest court "sees only white" and compares its work to Dred Scott, the accusation of racism is not subtle. It is explicit.
The broader pattern matters here. Chief Justice Roberts has repeatedly urged Americans to understand the Court as a legal institution, not a political body. Eddins' opinion treats it as the opposite, a partisan operation whose rulings deserve not engagement or respectful disagreement but wholesale rejection.
Supporters of Eddins' approach will argue that state courts have always been free to interpret their own constitutions more broadly than the federal Constitution. That principle is well established. Nothing prevents Hawaii from granting its residents greater protections under state law than the U.S. Constitution requires.
But that is not what makes this opinion extraordinary. The extraordinary part is the tone, the scope, and the purpose. Eddins did not simply rule that Hawaii's due process protections exceed the federal floor. He used an unrelated criminal case to deliver a political speech from the bench, one that accused six sitting Supreme Court justices of racism, authoritarianism, and bad faith.
The opinion's language, calling the Roberts Court's work "white noise," declaring it unworthy of guiding Hawaii's constitutional interpretation, goes well beyond the traditional exercise of independent state constitutionalism. It reads as a declaration of judicial resistance, wrapped in the authority of a court ruling that most citizens will never read.
The Roberts Court's recent rulings on campaign finance and other contested issues have drawn criticism from the left for years. But criticism from law professors and editorial boards is one thing. A sitting state supreme court justice embedding that criticism in binding judicial opinions, and declaring that his court will disregard the high court's guidance, is something different.
It raises a practical question that the opinion does not answer: If Hawaii's courts refuse to look to the U.S. Supreme Court on due process, equal protection, and the Second Amendment, what happens the next time a federal ruling directly conflicts with a Hawaii state court decision? The ongoing Second Amendment battles in other circuits suggest that question is not hypothetical.
Lost in the political firestorm is the actual case. A man was convicted in 1990 on Maui based partly on hair and fiber evidence presented by an FBI expert. That forensic method has since been discredited. The Hawaii Supreme Court ordered a new trial, a defensible outcome on its own merits.
Whether the defendant will be retried, and what evidence remains after more than three decades, are questions the opinion does not address. The victim of the original crime, a woman who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted, now faces the prospect of a case reopened not because of new exculpatory evidence, but because the forensic science used at trial no longer meets current standards.
That is a legitimate legal issue. It deserved a serious, focused opinion. Instead, it got a political broadside against the Roberts Court that has overshadowed the case entirely.
The American legal system depends on a basic compact: judges apply the law, and they do so with a measure of restraint that separates their work from the political branches. Legislators campaign. Governors give speeches. Judges write opinions grounded in the facts of the case before them.
Justice Eddins abandoned that compact. He used the power of his office and the vehicle of a binding court opinion to deliver a political address that no elected official in Hawaii could have delivered with the same institutional weight. The opinion carries the force of law. The eight-page attack on the Roberts Court carries the force of a press release.
The defendant in State v. Granillo deserved a ruling on his case. The people of Hawaii deserved a court focused on the law. What they got instead was a justice who decided the most important thing about a 1990 kidnapping case was his opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court.
When judges start writing manifestos instead of opinions, the losers are not the justices they criticize. The losers are the people who depend on courts to be courts.
