Only Souter and John Paul Stevens found fault with the conviction under these circumstances. He also endorsed the use of a "pen register," providing information on phone calls placed by criminal suspects, without use of a search warrant. "Souter again sided with Stevens -- and against all other justices -- in holding that California had somehow done injury to a convicted murderer when it changed the parole law after his conviction in a way that would allow him to seek parole only once every three years rather than once every year.No, it was the (then) 44 Republican senators and the entire Washington conservative establishment whose tracking antennae he eluded. Scalia, in a dissent joined by Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist, noted that two lower federal courts and all the state courts had rejected the claim at issue -- that excluded evidence could show that the accused was "the victim of a 'frame up' by the police informer and evil genius [known as] Beanie." When Senate Democrats questioned him on such actions, Souter passed them all off as the dutiful actions of a political subordinate, defending his "client," the governor.As a New Hampshire judge, Souter was generally reluctant to overturn criminal convictions on technical grounds. They could find almost no one of any stature in New Hampshire who had much to say about Souter, except to praise his conscientiousness.Indeed, Souter's positions are now almost indistinguishable from those of his predecessor, Justice William Brennan, the most relentless and effective champion of liberal judicial activism in the past half century. David Souter, stealth candidate -- that was the soundbite in the summer of 1990, when President Bush announced the unknown New Hampshire judge's surprise nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Before retiring from the Supreme Court in 2009, liberal Justice David Souter penned a dissent so critical of the court's conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts went to … He arrived with no agenda, and he never set out an overreaching judicial philosophy.He may not have signed onto the Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion had he been on the court in 1973, but he was unwilling to vote to overturn it after its nearly 20 years as a precedent. Five years later, the damage is glaringly obvious. Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun, Republican appointees from the 1970s, joined them to make a 5-4 majority, dealing Rehnquist an unexpected defeat.In the summer of 1990, the court’s 84-year-old liberal leader, William J. Brennan, suffered a stroke and announced his retirement. Such cases, in fact, generate a continual stream of appeals to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and Souter's rulings in this area gave him a reputation for being hardnosed. I just never thought much about them.
On The Bench. Justice David H. Souter is a conservative man in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Only one conservative organization, Howard Phillips's Conservative Caucus, raised its voice in opposition to Souter at the time of the confirmation proceedings (and then solely on the basis of doubts about Souter's personal views on abortion). As it turned out, Souter generally was a liberal … Even Breyer and Ginsburg agreed that the verdict should still be affirmed. David Hackett Souter is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Souter also worried about permitting the Ku Klux Klan to set up a cross on a public square, since the permit for the Klan might seem to send a "message" of "public endorsement" -- of Christianity!In fact, this sort of pomposity leads other conservatives to interpret Souter's surprising record in Washington as the response of a small-timer, dazzled and made giddy by the vastly broader challenges of the Supreme Court. By this point in their freshman terms, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy had all written opinions and dissents numbering in the two digits. David H. Souter had no agenda 19 years ago when he took his seat on the Supreme Court, but he did have a goal: not to become a creature of Washington, a captive of the privileges and power that came with a job he was entitled to hold for the rest of his life.