Intent vs. Impact: Recent Landmark Supreme Court Decisions

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest federal court of the United States. In the legal system of the United States, the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of federal constitutional law. This week the court issued three landmark decisions.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Barack Obama a major victory on Thursday by upholding tax subsidies crucial to his signature healthcare law, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying Congress clearly intended for them to be available in all 50 states.

In King v. Burwell (June 25, 2015), the court ruled on a 6-3 vote that the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), widely known as Obamacare, did not restrict the subsidies to states that establish their own online healthcare exchanges. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it.

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," Roberts wrote in the court's decision, adding that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid."

The Obama administration has hailed the law as a success, saying 16.4 million previously uninsured people have gained health insurance since it was enacted.

 

On the same day that the ACA ruling was issued, the court issued its decision in Texas Dep't of Housing, & Community Affairs v.Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (June 25, 2015): Claims of housing discrimination based on disparate impact rather than a showing of discriminatory intent may be brought under the Fair Housing Act. To defeat a defense based on business justification or a public interest, a plaintiff must identify an available alternative that serves the defendant's needs and would have less disparate impact. Although this decision got much less airing in the media, it is a landmark decision. In effect the ruling says discrimination may not have been intended in the actions taken, but the effect is discriminatory as evidenced by its disparate impact. This ruling gives further weigh to impact as defense against discrimination under the Fair Housing Law. Oddly enough, the court upheld the ACA based on the intent of the law, while it decreed the intent is also weighed by disparate impact under Fair Housing Act.

SCOTUS issued its ruling on Same Sex Marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (June 26, 2015): Under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, all states must license a marriage between two people of the same sex and recognize such a marriage if it was lawfully licensed and performed in another state.

All in all these decisions furthered the cause of equal treatment under the law for all American citizens.

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The Supreme Court-How it Works

The Supreme Court is the most powerful court in the United States. It was set up by the founding fathers of the United States in the third article of the Constitution.

 The court is made up of nine members, called justices. There is one chief justice and eight associate justices. They are appointed by the president and can serve on the Supreme Court their whole lives. A justice can only be dismissed if they do something wrong or illegal. Each justice must be approved by the Senate before they take office.

 The Supreme Court guards and defends the American constitution. It decides legal cases that arise between citizens, states and the federal government. In most cases the Supreme Court hears cases that have already been decided before a lower court. When someone who has lost a case thinks that the decision is wrong, he or she can appeal to higher courts. The highest court of appeal is the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, cannot deal with all the cases that are brought to it. Each year it hears about 250 cases, only choosing the ones that the justices think are most important.

 When the Supreme Court hears a case both parties have the chance to bring their arguments before the justices, who may then ask questions. Parties can also present written papers that show their opinion. There are no witnesses at such a hearing and there is no jury allowed.

 At the end of the hearing the justices vote on the case. They must reach a decision by majority vote. Then a justice is chosen to write down the opinion of what most justices think. In many cases not all justices have the same opinion on a topic.

When the Supreme Court decides something it is final. All the other courts in the country must decide an issue in the same way. A Supreme Court ruling can be turned around in two ways. Sometimes the members of Congress amend the constitution, or the Supreme Court itself may later on decide differently in a similar case.

 For example, in 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that the government was not allowed to collect taxes from its citizens. Two decades later Congress passed the 16th Amendment, which gave the government the right to collect money from the people.

In another issue the Supreme Court changed its view on what it thought about how blacks and whites should live together. In 1896 it decided that blacks and whites should have separate public places, like schools, bus stops etc... In 1954 the court ruled that sending blacks and whites to different schools was against the constitution.

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A Thousand Days Waiting: Kalief Browder's Ordeal

When I heard the story of Kalief Browder, I was first shocked, then, angry, and finally saddened. My thoughts went instantly to my seventeen year old grandson, Mekhi, and then to my nephews Cameron and Christian, twenty-five and twenty-two respectively. I realized once again that this story could be their story and then I got on my knees and prayed.
 

Kalief Browder spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times.

Jennifer Gonnerman, a reporter for The New Yorker magazine tells of  Kalief’s efforts to end his life in her article "Before The Law". Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

 In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

Then, late last year, about two months after the story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When Gonnerman visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

 After two weeks at St. Barnabas, Browder was released and sent back home. The next day, his lawyer, Paul V. Prestia, got a call from an official at Bronx Community College. An anonymous donor (who had likely read the New Yorker story) had offered to pay his tuition for the semester. This happy news prompted Browder to reenroll. For the next few months he seemed to thrive. He rode his bicycle back and forth to school every day, he no longer got panic attacks sitting in a classroom, and he earned better grades than he had the prior semester.

 Kelief Browder told stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but Gonnerman says she did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when she obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. Sitting next to Kalief she watched these videos for the first time with him. Afterward, they discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. She told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

 He was driven by the same motive that led him to talk to Gonnerman for the first time, a year earlier. He wanted the public to know what he had gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals. His willingness to tell his story publicly—and his ability to recount it with great insight—ultimately helped persuade Mayor Bill de Blasio to try to reform the city’s court system and end the sort of excessive delays that kept him in jail for so long.

Browder’s story also caught the attention of Rand Paul, who began talking about him on the campaign trail. Jay Z met with Browder after watching the videos. Rosie O’Donnell invited him on “The View” last year and recently had him over for dinner. Browder could be a very private person, and he told almost nobody about meeting O’Donnell or Jay Z. However, in a picture taken of him with Jay Z, who draped an arm around his shoulders, Browder looked euphoric.

 Last Monday, Prestia, who had filed a lawsuit on Browder’s behalf against the city, noticed that Browder had put up a couple of odd posts on Facebook. When Prestia sent him a text message, asking what was going on, Browder insisted he was O.K. “Are you sure everything is cool?” Prestia wrote. Browder replied: “Yea I’m alright thanks man.” The two spoke on Wednesday, and Browder did seem fine. On Saturday afternoon, Prestia got a call from Browder’s mother: he had committed suicide.

I'm convinced that our dysfunctional U. S. Justice system killed Kalief Browder. There's more to his story. Read the Exclusive in the Daily News and learn about another recent suicide, an 18 year old Riker's Island inmate who hanged himself in his cell. 

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NYC Pays $100 Million in Firefighter Bias Suit

Awareness of the lack of diversity in police departments across the nation has captured the public’s attention. For example, although African Americans are 67% of the population in Ferguson, MO, only 6% of the police force is African American. In Cleveland, OH, Blacks are 53% of the population yet only 25% of the police force. In New York City, Blacks are 26% of the population and 18% of the police force.

Lack of diversity in Fire Departments in large urban cities is common. Statistics show under representation of minorities in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore.  In 2007, African Americans made up only 3% of New York’s Fire Department. The Vulcan Society has been fighting for almost 75 years to open the doors of the New York City Fire Department to black firefighters. The federal government sued the city (United States of America and Vulcan Society Inc. vs. City of New York) over fire department entrance exams they said discriminated against black and Latino applicants. A group of black firefighters alleged the city had intentionally discriminated against them, violating Title VII, the U.S. Constitution and state law.

The law suit stated: "According to the most recent census data, black residents make up 25.6% of New York City's population; when this case was filed in 2007, black firefighters accounted for only 3.4% of the Department's force. In other words, in a city of over eight million people, and out of a force with 8,998 firefighters, there were only 303 black firefighters.

"This pattern of under representation has remained essentially unchanged since at least the 1960s. While the city's other uniformed services have made rapid progress integrating black members into their ranks, the Fire Department has stagnated and at times retrogressed."

The lack of minorities in U.S. fire departments has been the focus of many lawsuits. The last available national figures, from the 2000 census, show 8.4% of the nation's firefighting forces to be black and 8.6% to be Latino. Blacks are 12.2% of the population; Latinos are roughly 16%. However, other big cities have made much faster progress at diversifying their ranks. More than half of the Philadelphia and Los Angeles fire departments members are black or Latino.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garufis ordered New York City to pay $128 million in to firefighters who allege the city used an entrance exam that deliberately sought to keep African-Americans and Latino Americans off the force. The judge also ordered the FDNY to hire 293 black and Latino applicants.

Lawyers for the firefighters who sued said the decision would mean payments to black and Latino applicants to the New York Fire Department who were never hired or hired late from the 1999 and 2002 eligibility lists that resulted from exams given those years. Paul Washington, past president of the Vulcan Society, said: “This is a great victory for those who have been excluded from serving our city because of their race. We hope the FDNY moves quickly to welcome the 293 Black and Latino applicants who are entitled to be hired, and we look forward to serving with them."

 

For a detailed chronicle of the century fight for diversity in FDNY read "Fire Fight" by Ginger Adams Otis.

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NY Times Summer Reading List: Alternatives

Jason Parham, writer for The Gawker, congratulates Janet Maslin’s annual summer reading list for the New York Times for, at long last, achieving 100% whiteness. “Maslin’s book selections for summer 2015 all have one glaring fact in common: each author is—wait for it... wait for it—white.”

Here’s the list’s diversity performance from past years:

2012: 90.4% 20/21 (Exception: Mindy Kaling)

2013: 93.7% 15/16 (Exception: Kevin Kwan with “Crazy Rich Asians”)

2014: 88% 15/17  (Alarmingly diverse! Exceptions: Mariano Rivera and Laline Paul)

2015: 100% 17/17 (Total Whiteout!)

 

Maslin’s list is pretty unforgivable because there are a number of great books being released this summer by writers of color. Here are a few books that Parham and The Gawker suggested:

In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar (June 16)

The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson (June 30)

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari (June 16)

Flood of Fire by Amitov Ghosh (August 4)

Loving Day by Mat Johnson (May 26, but it still counts)

And, for those lucky enough to get an advance copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me (September 8)

Parham closes his list of recommendations with a taunt to Ms. Maslin, “ See, that wasn’t so hard Janet”.

 

There are several books that I would like to recommend to add to both lists. Kick back, stretch out with a cool summer drink in hand, and read. I promise you’ll learn something.

 

 

 

Third and A Mile: The Trials and Triumphs of the Black Quarterback by William C. Rhoden

 

 

Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America by Beryl Satter

 

 

 

 

Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

Firefight: The Century- Long Battle to Integrate New York’s Bravest by Ginger Adams Otis

 

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