More on Summary Execution Sammy…

…from Emily Bazelon:

What should matter more to the senators who will soon decide whether Alito will sit on the Supreme Court is that his record as an appeals court judge shows that his views have not changed since Garner. In case after case, Alito has taken the side of police and prosecutors. Can the police stop—and hold at gunpoint—members of a family who happened to be standing on the doorstep of an apartment that the cops had come to raid? Can the police frisk a 10-year-old girl who is nowhere mentioned in their warrant? Yes and yes. In one opinion after the next, Alito looks at search-and-seizure cases like a former prosecutor, which he is.

Does it matter that in many of these cases, the people getting the back of the hand from the cops are poor and black? Garner’s father argued that the Memphis Police Department’s policy toward fleeing felons violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Between 1969 and 1976, the Memphis police shot and killed eight white suspects and 16 black ones. Only one of the white suspects was neither armed nor assaulting a police officer. Thirteen of the black suspects were. The statistics were part of the evidence presented by Garner’s father. Alito may well not have read that brief. And if he had, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. His concern isn’t the world of Edward Garner.

One word: filibuster.

…from a commenter at Digby’s, shorter Republican Party: “Black children are constitutionally protected until birth. After that they’re fair game.”