Pointing to government-friendly rulings on police illegal searches and seizures and Guantánamo detainee rights, some criminal justice reform advocates are greeting President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court with skepticism.
No one is saying that Garland, the current chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court, is a conservative. But there is concern that Garland, a former prosecutor nominated by a president with a penchant for nominating prosecutors, could hold the line on criminal law, or even move it to the right, at a time of growing consensus that the system must be radically reformed and downsized. For all of Justice Antonin Scalia’s bigoted faults, he was, as Radley Balko notes, “comparatively good on the 4th, 6th Amendments.” ...