The even bigger scandal here is that because of a series of Supreme Court-promulgated legal “doctrines” that the lower federal courts interpret as denying state criminal defendants and civil (non-criminal) litigants access to federal court in order to challenge the constitutionality of state-court or state prosecutorial patterns and practices, state courts and state prosecutors effectively have free rein to violate the constitutional rights of anyone unlucky enough to have to litigate in state court.
The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires states to comply with the Constitution’s mandates and proscriptions, but the federal courts interpret that Clause as limited to the actions of states’ executive and legislative branches.
If Mississippi’s legislature enacted a law that authorized the perversions described in this article, criminal defendants subjected to this legislative outrage could suit in federal court to obtain what is known as a declaratory judgment that declares the law unconstitutional, and then could obtain an order from that federal court enjoining the State from implementing the law.
But because the federal courts exalt the supposed rights of the judicial branch of state government above all else, including the Supremacy Clause and certainly above the due process and equal protection rights of individuals, any such federal lawsuit would be dismissed as violative of one of the Supreme Court-created “subject matter jurisdiction” doctrines.
No matter that the Constitution itself gives the Supreme Court no right to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts unless the Supreme Court bases its limiting jurisdictional doctrine upon some provision in the Constitution itself—which the Supreme Court does not. The Court makes no pretense that these doctrines are mandated by the Constitution or are anything other than reflective of the Court’s own policy choice, a policy that the Court claims is one of comity to the states but is really just comity to state-court judges.
Call it professional courtesy.
