A Hawaii Supreme Court justice used a 91-page criminal case ruling to launch an extended political attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the conservative majority of abandoning civil rights, advancing a political agenda, and producing jurisprudence the state should treat as irrelevant. The opinion, issued Wednesday, devoted roughly eight pages not to the facts of the case but to a sweeping indictment of the Roberts Court's legitimacy.

Justice Todd Eddins, a Democratic appointee who has sat on Hawaii's high court since 2020, authored the majority opinion in State v. Granillo. The underlying case involved a man convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman on Maui. The court ordered a new trial after concluding that FBI hair-and-fiber forensic evidence presented at the original trial relied on science that has since been discredited.

That narrow forensic holding, however, was not what drew national attention. What drew attention was Eddins' decision to use the opinion as a vehicle for an extraordinary denunciation of the nation's highest court, and a declaration that Hawaii's judiciary should ignore its guidance entirely.

Eight pages of grievance in a forensic-evidence case

The opinion in State v. Granillo (SCWC-22-0000740) runs 91 pages. Fox News Digital reported that approximately eight of those pages amount to a direct critique of the Roberts Court, touching on abortion, gun rights, campaign finance, presidential immunity, gerrymandering, and race, none of which bear any obvious connection to discredited FBI hair analysis from 1990.

Eddins compared the current Court's constitutional reasoning to the reasoning behind two of the most reviled decisions in American legal history. From 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."

The references are unmistakable. Eddins was likening the Roberts Court's approach to the reasoning in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson, decisions that upheld slavery and racial segregation, respectively, while casting aside Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark that ended school segregation.

That is not a legal argument. It is an accusation of moral equivalence with the worst chapters of American judicial history, lodged from the bench of a state court against sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

A catalog of grievances, case by case

Eddins cited a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions as evidence that the conservative majority has systematically weakened constitutional protections. The cases named in the opinion include Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which returned abortion regulation to the states; Citizens United v. FEC, which protected political speech by corporations and unions; Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that partisan gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable; Trump v. United States, which addressed presidential immunity; and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which affirmed the individual right to carry firearms in public.

The Court has issued a number of consequential rulings in recent terms, and each of the decisions Eddins cited has drawn criticism from the left. But embedding that criticism inside a majority opinion in an unrelated criminal case, and declaring the Supreme Court's work to be beneath consideration, crosses a line that legal observers on both sides of the aisle noticed immediately.

Eddins wrote bluntly about the Court's equal protection jurisprudence:

"The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect."

He went further, characterizing the Court's originalist methodology as a tool of control rather than a principled interpretive framework:

"Today's hubristic originalists use the same method to control modern life."

'White noise': Hawaii declares independence from federal precedent

The most provocative dimension of the opinion is not its tone, though the tone is remarkable, but its operative conclusion. Eddins declared that Hawaii courts should not look to the Roberts Court when interpreting the state constitution. National Review noted that the opinion went so far as to call federal precedent "white noise" and stated that the Hawaii Supreme Court "takes no guidance on the meaning of due process" from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Eddins framed this not as defiance but as constitutional design:

"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."

But calling the considered rulings of the nation's highest court "white noise" is defiance, whatever label the author prefers. State courts have long held the authority to interpret their own constitutions more broadly than the federal floor, that principle is well established. What is not established, and what Eddins appears to be attempting, is using a state court opinion as a platform to delegitimize the Supreme Court itself and to declare, as a matter of judicial policy, that its reasoning is unworthy of engagement.

The opinion stated the case plainly:

"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."

And:

"A court that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution."

A pattern, not an isolated outburst

This is not the first time Hawaii's judiciary has clashed with the Roberts Court. Just weeks before the Granillo opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Hawaii's so-called "vampire rule" in Wolford v. Lopez, a 6-3 decision that invalidated a state law requiring gun owners to obtain a property owner's permission before carrying a firearm into businesses and other private property open to the public.

That rebuke from Washington was fresh when Eddins sat down to write. The timing suggests the Granillo opinion may have been shaped as much by institutional grievance as by the forensic-evidence question at its core. The pattern of progressive frustration with the Court's recent rulings is well documented, but frustration expressed through political commentary or legislative action is one thing. Frustration expressed through the machinery of a judicial opinion, binding on lower courts and carrying the weight of law, is something else entirely.

Legal scholars and officials respond

Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan reacted sharply on X, writing:

"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, a frequent commentator on judicial overreach, described the opinion as "devoid of judicial restraint and decorum." He posted on X:

"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's characterization is hard to dispute on the merits. When a state supreme court justice writes that the Roberts Court "sees only white" and compares its reasoning to Dred Scott, the implication is not subtle. It is a charge of racial indifference, or worse, directed at named, sitting justices.

The invocation of slavery-era precedents to attack fellow jurists has become an increasingly common tactic in progressive legal circles. What makes the Eddins opinion different is that it was not a dissent, not an op-ed, not a law review article. It was the majority opinion of a state supreme court, embedded in a case about forensic evidence, with no doctrinal necessity for the political commentary it contained.

The real question: who benefits?

Justice Eddins was appointed by former Democratic Gov. David Ige. He has served on the Hawaii Supreme Court since 2020. His opinion in Granillo reads less like a legal analysis and more like a political manifesto, one that happens to carry the imprimatur of a state's highest court.

The forensic-evidence question in the case may well have merit. If FBI hair-and-fiber analysis used at a 1990 trial has been discredited, a new trial could be warranted on those grounds alone. But that holding did not require eight pages of political commentary about abortion, guns, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and presidential immunity. It did not require comparing the Roberts Court to the architects of Dred Scott. And it did not require declaring the Supreme Court's work to be "white noise."

Those additions served no legal purpose in the case before the court. They served a political purpose, signaling to progressive audiences that Hawaii's judiciary considers itself unbound by the constitutional interpretations of a Court whose composition it dislikes.

The left's ongoing campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Roberts Court has taken many forms: court-packing proposals, ethics attacks, and now, apparently, state court opinions that double as op-eds. The common thread is a refusal to accept that a constitutionally appointed Court, interpreting the Constitution as written, can reach conclusions that progressives dislike without being illegitimate.

Judicial independence or judicial defiance?

State constitutionalism is a real and important principle. Hawaii's courts are free to interpret their own constitution to provide broader protections than the federal baseline. No serious legal thinker disputes that.

But that principle does not require, or justify, a state supreme court justice using a criminal case opinion to accuse the U.S. Supreme Court of racism, compare it to the courts that upheld slavery and segregation, and declare its jurisprudence unworthy of consideration. That is not state constitutionalism. That is a political statement dressed in a robe.

The Supreme Court continues to hear cases that will shape the boundaries of federal and state authority for decades. The system works only if state courts engage with federal precedent honestly, even when they disagree. Dismissing it as "white noise" is not engagement. It is abdication.

When a judge uses the bench to deliver a political speech, the losers are not the justices he attacks. The losers are the people who depend on courts to be courts, not megaphones for the party that appointed the judge.