Oh, no!

Not again.

Say it ain’t so, judge.

Anthony Hopkins as former president John Quincy Adams delivers a most eloquent argument against slavery and for freedom based on the Declaration of Independence and international law before the United States Supreme Court of 1841. This might be a good time to revisit it, considering the immigration crisis facing the U.S. and states such as Alabama today. All people should see this movie, especially modern-day self-styled Conservative Republicans, who think they know something about American freedom. I was moved by this scene. Perhaps you would be too.

The Amistad case, also known as United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, was a U.S. Supreme Court case resulting from the rebellion of slaves on board the Spanish schooner Amistad in 1839. It was an unusual suit in a long line of cases that came to define what “freedom” meant under the law in the United States.

The rebellion broke out when the schooner, traveling along the coast of Cuba, was taken over by a group of captives who had earlier been illegally kidnapped in Africa from a British Colony where the slave trade was outlawed, modern day Sierra Leone, and sold into slavery. The Africans revolted and took over the ship, but their ship was captured near Long Island, New York, by the U.S. Revenue cutter and taken into custody. The widely publicized court cases in the United States helped the abolitionist movement in its argument against slavery, and some say it was a precursor to the Civil War, although there are historians and critics who disagree.

In 1840, a federal trial court found that the initial transport of the Africans across the Atlantic had been illegal, because the international slave trade had been abolished, and the captives were thus not legally slaves but free. Given that they were illegally confined, the Africans were entitled to take whatever legal measures necessary to secure their freedom, including the use of force. After the US Supreme Court affirmed this finding on March 9, 1841, supporters arranged transportation for the Africans back to Africa in 1842. The case influenced numerous succeeding laws in the United States, according to Wikipedia and other sources.

The Mende believed that when faced with a situation in which there is no hope at all, they invoke their ancestors. They believe if they can summon the spirit of their ancestors then they have never left, Hopkins argues, invoking the founding fathers of the U.S. and their phrase in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”

“We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding, that who we are is who we were.”

He exhorts the court by saying: “We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears and our prejudices — ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. If it means civil war, then let it come. And when it does, let it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.”

PublicCitizen is asking candidates around the country to stand with their constituents and demand that elections be returned to voters.

In January, the Supreme Court tossed out a hundred years of election laws and declared that corporations were free to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. The Court concluded that corporations have the same free speech rights as people, and thus the same freedom to participate in our electoral process.

The only way to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision is to amend the Constitution to put elections back in the hands of voters. We are asking every candidate for Congress to sign the Pledge to Protect America’s Democracy, and promise to work toward a Constitutional Amendment that will protect a government of, by and for the people.

An astounding exchange for the year 2009. Check out the look on Rachel Maddow’s face. Is it about time for Pat Buchanan to retire from the public limelight?

Guest Column
by David Gespass

The headline to Jeff Sessions’ op-ed in the July 13 Birmingham News (no link available on their al.com Website) promised a fair hearing for Sonia Sotomayor. But the article itself raises questions about whether Senator Sessions was prepared to provide one.

He initially claims that, if confirmed, Judge Sotomayor “will have the power to define the meaning of our Constitution,” which is certainly an exaggeration. She would be one of nine justices and only a majority can make such a decision. This is not an unimportant distinction, since the collective decision-making of the Court can only be enhanced if the backgrounds of the justices are diverse.

More to the point, he asserts that it is wrong to expect a judge, because of her life experiences, to have empathy, claiming that showing empathy to one party demonstrates prejudice to another. Sessions is simply wrong if he is claiming that the judges he would support would not show either empathy or prejudice.

It is well known, for example, that Clarence Thomas –- undoubtedly an ideal justice from Sessions’ point of view –- emerged from his usual sphinx-like silence during oral argument in the case of Virginia v. Black to argue, with unusual passion, that the only purpose of cross-burning is to inculcate fear and terror. By so doing, Thomas is generally credited with ensuring that the Court would uphold the constitutionality of Virginia’s law criminalizing cross-burning.

Does Sessions claim that Justice Thomas’s empathy for the victims of Klan violence should not have been a factor in his assessment of the law or is he only concerned with empathy for those he considers the wrong people?

When Thurgood Marshall sat on the Court, he was alone among the justices in having represented clients facing the death penalty, in having represented victims of race hatred and in having experienced such prejudice himself. Perhaps his most profound influence on the Court derived from that perspective and the personal experience he was able to impart to the other justices when they deliberated in conference. No less a conservative light than Chief Justice Rehnquist acknowledged and recognized the importance to the Court of Marshall’s life experience.

Presumably, Sessions also thinks less of Justice Blackmun for his dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services. The majority of the Court found that the social workers could not be held liable for their failure to act on numerous and unmistakable indications of severe abuse of Joshua DeShaney at the hands of his father, who finally beat his son into a coma. Repeated beatings caused such severe brain damage that he is expected to spend his life in an institution.

Justice Blackmun, in dissent, wrote of “poor Joshua,” whose story appeared irrelevant to the majority. In short, Justice Blackmon displayed empathy for the victim while others maintained such dispassionate objectivity they were not moved by the near-death of a defenseless child while state workers, whose job it was to protect him, did nothing.

I would take a bit more empathy and bit less detachment in my judges. It is a common outcome of lack of judicial empathy that the victims of egregious violations by government actors are uncompensated. Indeed, more often than I would wish, Judge Sotomayor has displayed precisely such a lack of empathy for victims of police misconduct.

Does Sessions really believe that the other justices do not bring their personal beliefs and prejudices to bear in their decisions? Does he really think that Scalia’s Catholicism, not to mention Thomas’s, Alito’s and Roberts’s, has no effect on how they view such issues as abortion and gay rights? Does he really believe that these stalwarts come to the bench as tabulae rasa unsullied by human emotion, judicial automatons who digest the facts of a case, run them through their computer-like memory banks of brains, find the appropriate precedents and render their decisions?

One would hope not, because it was that approach that led to Chief Justice Taney holding in the Dred Scott case that African-Americans had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” After all, they had no rights in the past, there was no precedent for them to have any rights, so why would one expect them to have rights going forward?

Finally, Sessions’ complaint about Judge Sotomayor’s decision in the New Haven firefighters case is more than a bit disingenuous. Of the 13 judges who considered the case, eight held in favor of the city of New Haven. A majority of five on the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, but Judge Sotomayor’s decision is hardly disqualifying. There is a long history of job tests that fully qualified people of color or women do not pass and which have been proven to be unreliable indicia of future success.

Looked at from the point of view of firefighters of color, one must recognize that the racially skewed results of the exam create at least the reasonable inference that the test discriminated against them in practice. For years, white society discriminated against people of color, insuring whites would get the best jobs and the highest positions. Now that discrimination is illegal, the Supreme Court is insuring that same outcome in the name of prohibiting discrimination.

Chief Justice Jackson pointed out that the Supreme Court is not the final court because the justices are infallible, but rather is infallible because it is the final court. Such humility would be welcome today, on the Court and in Congress.

While Judge Sotomayor would not have been my first choice to fill the vacancy left by Justice Souter’s retirement, I think the Court would be well served by the addition of a wise Latina woman. The country would be well served by justices who displayed a little more wisdom and a little less sophistry.

Davis Gespass is an attorney in Birmingham, Alabama and president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild.