North Carolina State Supreme Court Chief Justice Saw Black Lady Justice Dancing With The Devil In The Moonlight
Scratch that: She said racism exists.
In yet another attack on people who make rightwing white people uncomfortable by speaking about reality, North Carolina’s state judicial standards commission launched an “investigation” into Anita Earls, the only Black woman on the state supreme court. Her supposed offense? Discussing diversity and bias in the state’s courts system during an interview with Law360, a legal news publication. Justice Earls sued the commission last month in federal court, with her lawyers arguing that “a series of months-long intrusive investigations” had caused a “chilling of her first amendment rights.”
In the June interview, Earls was asked about a study finding that “attorneys who argue before the state supreme court are 90% white and 70% male.” She said she didn’t believe that there was was "conscious, intentional, racial animus” in the courts, but rather that “our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.”
Now, as anyone knows, “implicit bias” is a forbidden term, because rightwing states have passed laws declaring that systemic racism is officially not real, and only a terrible racist America-hater would say it is.
Earls remarked that
"There have been cases where I have felt very uncomfortable on the bench because I feel like my colleagues are unfairly cutting off a female advocate. […]
“We have so few people of color argue, but in one case there was a Black woman who argued in front of us and I felt like she was being attacked unfairly, not allowed to answer the question, interrupted.”
She also criticized state Chief Justice Paul Newby for shutting down a couple of committees aimed at promoting equity and diversity, which are also curse words for rightwingers these days.
The judicial standards commission — made up mostly of conservative judges appointed by Newby — informed Earls in an August 15 letter that she was being investigated for supposedly violating the state’s code of judicial conduct in that interview. Her suggestion that any members of the supreme court might be “acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias” supposedly violated those rules, which require judges to conduct themselves “in a manner which promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”
If she’s found to have libelslandered her colleagues by calling them human beings who have implicit biases, the penalty could range from a reprimand that would go in her Permanent Record all the way up to removal from the court and a ban from running for it ever again.
All of this is taking place not only in the context of the neverending rightwing freakout over “critical race theory,” but more importantly, of rightwing Republicans’ efforts to use partisan judges to back up minority rule.
You might have heard of a little ruckus in Wisconsin, where the lege is toying with the delightful idea of impeaching its newest justice, Janet Protasiewicz, and then just, like Mitch McConnell in the Obama years, declining to hold the vote forever.
And right in North Carolina, when Democrats were in the majority on the state supreme court, the court struck down the state legislature’s district maps, which were gerrymandered to give Republicans outsized influence in the legislature and in Congress. But the 2022 midterm elections returned Republicans to the court’s majority, and in May, the court found that the districts were magically not a partisan gerrymander at all. The maps were exactly the same, but the court had changed.
Justice Earls wrote a scathing 71-page dissent in the case, arguing that the ruling sought “to ensure that extreme partisan gerrymanders favoring Republicans are established.”
This week, there’s a new wrinkle in the effort to punish Earls, as reported by Raleigh TV station WRAL. Democratic state Rep. Abe Jones said at a Wednesday news conference that he had learned — from sources he declined to identify — that the investigation had actually been pushed by Chief Justice Paul Newby himself. (Newby’s office didn’t reply to WRAL’s request for comment.)
Jones was one of three dozen Black state lawmakers and supporters who gathered at the legislature Wednesday to say they know exactly why Earls is being investigated: Conservatives are making an example of the state’s most powerful judges, they said, to frighten other lawyers and judges away from addressing systemic racism in a state with a long history of it.
“When folks in the public see that she’s being targeted because of that, think about what that does to a person,” said Rep. Allen Buansi, a Chapel Hill Democrat and attorney. “I can easily see a situation in which, as a result of what’s been done to Justice Earls, a Black lawyer or lawyer of color goes to court — and they think twice about something they say on behalf of their client.”
Newby, the story goes on to explain, isn’t exactly qualified to throw stones when it comes to criticizing other justices, either, as Jones called attention to at the presser.
In 2019, when Newby was at the time the only Republican on the state’s highest court, he gave a speech criticizing all of the other justices as far-left political activists. Newby also singled out Earls specifically, telling the audience that her election to the court just months earlier had worried him so much he lost sleep over it. Earls was a prominent civil rights attorney prior to becoming a judge.
“He makes comments about political things,” Jones said of Newby. “No one tries to stop him. So why does he want to stop her?”
OK, but that’s different, because Newby’s party now has the majority on the court and he can do what he wants, that’s just how America works, so stop your partisan complaining, the end.
[Guardian / Popular Info / WUNC / WRAL / Image: Screenshot, News & Observer on YouTube]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if a one-time donation is more convenient, we have exactly the button you’re looking for.
"Imagine seven 'AOCs' on the state Supreme Court," Newby told a Republican crowd.
You should be so lucky, you racist clown.
Fucking fragile old white men.
God damn am I tired of listening to them whine.