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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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State criminal courts don't do constitutional debates. He broke NY law. Whether that law is unconstitutional (probably yes) is outside the remit of that court.

  • -12

I was pleasantly surprised that ChatGPT was able to produce real court cases where State Courts have ruled on Constitutionality:

  1. People v. LaValle (NY, 2004)
    The New York Court of Appeals struck down the state's death penalty law, citing the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution. The court held that the death penalty statute violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
  2. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins (CA, 1979)
    The California Supreme Court upheld the right to free speech under the First Amendment and California Constitution, allowing individuals to gather signatures in shopping centers despite private property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision.
  3. State v. Santiago (CT, 2015)
    The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment due to its arbitrary application and evolving standards of decency.
  4. Commonwealth v. Wolfe (PA, 2016)
    The Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed federal Eighth Amendment issues regarding sentencing juveniles to life without parole. The court applied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama to ban such sentences.
  5. State v. Gregory (WA, 2018)
    The Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty law violated both the Eighth Amendment and the state's constitution due to evidence of racial bias in its application.

Older LLMs would regularly hallucinate with this sort of question.

Edit: link updated to include follow up ChatGPT conversation, which included State courts that weren't State Supreme Courts ruling on Constitutionality:

  • People v. Mann (NY, 1992): Ruled on the Fifth Amendment.
  • People v. Lovelace (IL, 2002): Applied Fourth Amendment protections.

Yes, not only do state criminal courts handle federal constitutional questions, it's actual necessary for a plaintiff or defendant to bring constitutional complaints to the trial-level court or they risk surrendering the question on appeal (with a few exceptions not relevant here).

This is not true. Trial-level criminal courts can and do apply constitutional arguments to their cases all the time.

So that implies... that challenging the constitutionality of the state law can still happen, but needs to be pushed through the court hierarchy to the federal courts before that can happen?

Gosh. What a system...

It's not true at all.

Could you elaborate?

To clarify a little more than supremacy, trial courts are triers of fact: did the accused do the thing the state says they did, and is that a violation of what the law says. They do not evaluate the validity of the laws.

If your belief is that the law itself is invalid then you have to make that case at the appellate courts.

trial courts (both federal and state) rule on the validity of laws (both federal and state) all the time

If your belief is that the law itself is invalid then you have to make that case at the appellate courts.

this is not true; in fact, failure to bring up "validity of law" claims at the trial court level typically bars the ability to bring up those issues at the appellate level

Huh, I don't know where I'd heard it but it looks like I'm 100% wrong. Thanks for the correction.

I always wonder if the US wouldn't benefit from a similar mechanism to the French QPC that gives persons a constitutional right to directly ask the high court if a promulgated law that is involved in their judicial proceedings is constitutional or not.

Would save everybody a lot of time and prevents politicians from exploiting the loophole of constantly passing unconstitutional laws faster than they can get taken down.

Sure it would require a constitutional amendment, but it's a sufficiently procedural and bipartisan idea that you may well get it ratified in less than a century.

I would like to see some kind of personal liability for legislators that are clearly flouting previous rulings. You shouldn't be able to use the state to deprive citizens of their rights with complete immunity.

Make it so legislators get their names tied to the laws and if struck down they can't propose any new ones themselves. Make the culpability directly tied to the legislator, no aides.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, both state and federally. State courts are certainly allowed to evaluate the constitutionality of state laws.

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