The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime”

On April 1, 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened to decide whether Alabama Assistant Attorney General Ed Carnes should become a judge on the US Court of Appeals. For 11 of the 16 years he worked as a government lawyer, Carnes had run the state’s unit that litigated cases of capital punishment. Usually Supreme Court nominations generate the most attention. But in the case of Carnes, the stakes were high: Judges on the 11th Circuit have responsibility for the interpretation of the law in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida—former slaveholding states with a long history of unequal justice. That day, Carnes’s own testimony fanned the flames of controversy. Under oath, Carnes vigorously denied that racism existed in the criminal justice system. Asked by Democratic Senator Howell Heflin about the large number of African Americans on death row in Alabama, he replied, “I do not believe that capital punishment is applied in a racially discriminatory manner in Alabama or in the Nation.” Instead, he attributed the lopsided proportion of minorities on death row to “economic disparity and hardship, and also the deterioration of the family unit.” Against Carnes were assembled both traditional civil rights groups and prominent human rights leaders, including the...