Robolito

by Scott Shields, Tue Jan 10, 2006 at 02:31:26 PM EST

One of the most telling things about this morning's Alito testimony was his bizarre detachment in talking about the strip search of a 10 year old girl. As I'm sure you know by now, he defended this warrantless strip search in a dissenting opinion in Doe v. Groody.

Try to set aside the potential merit (or lack thereof) in defending a warrantless strip search of a 10 year old girl and the fact that it seemingly ignores the Fourth Amendment. Instead, take note of the fact that it didn't seem to phase him that he's talking about a strip search of a 10 year old girl. It was downright creepy. When Senator Leahy asked him whether or not he had reconsidered his opinion in the case. Alito answered, "I haven't had occasion to think that what I said in that case was correct."

It's one thing to dispassionately consider the law without emotional bias. But it's another thing to ignore the real world human impact of legal decisions altogether, as Alito seemed to do in his response to Leahy this morning in reference to Doe. As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley explained in an op-ed in this morning's USA Today, even Alito's fellow conservatives found his cold analysis of the case to be lacking.

For example, in Doe v. Groody, Alito wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that police officers could strip-search a mother and her 10-year-old daughter, despite the fact that neither was named in the search warrant nor suspected of crimes. The majority opinion was authored by fellow Republican and conservative Judge Michael Chertoff (now serving as secretary of Homeland Security). Chertoff criticized Alito's views as threatening to "transform the judicial officer into little more than the cliché 'rubber stamp.' "

As someone pointed out on today's Brian Lehrer Show on New York public radio station WNYC (also broadcast on PRI World for satellite radio listeners), Alito's coldly detached answer to Leahy was reminiscent of Michael Dukakis's infamously awkward and clinically robotic answer to the question of whether or not he'd support the death penalty for someone who had raped his wife. It's one of those situations where you want to grab the person by the shoulders and start shaking them, just to get them to realize the gravity of the issue they're talking about.



Tags: Judges (all tags)


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