#SixTermsAndAMovie Trump2024

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In 1994, Mack Sims, who is Black, was convicted of attempted murder. Here is what happened: a security guard named Shane Carey had been sitting in a car in a darkened parking lot. Carey testified that he was approached by a Black man and shot. 15 to 20 minutes later, police found Mack Sims “near a walking path around twenty feet from where the shooting occurred.” They arrested Sims, though Sims did not match Carey’s description of the assailant: Carey had said his attacker had short hair or was bald, and was wearing black combat boots with black pants. Sims had longer curly hair, and was wearing blue jeans and white Nike sneakers when he was arrested. Carey testified that police showed him a picture of Sims while he was in the hospital, and though he was “groggy” and had not been wearing his glasses when he was shot, he identified Sims as the shooter. Carey then identified Sims several more times in lineups. At trial, Carey’s description of Sims became more precise and accurate than it had been before, and he said his “memory had improved.” It turned out, unbeknownst to Sims or his defense counsel, that the prosecution had paid for Carey to be hypnotized, and in his “dream state” he became certain that Sims had shot him. Carey’s testimony was the only thing tying Sims to the crime. There was no physical evidence. After Sims’ conviction, he was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
26 years later—the wheels of justice take their sweet time to go round—the case ended up before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which granted Sims’ writ of habeas corpus. The court found that the prosecution should have disclosed that they had hypnotized the star witness to “improve” his recollection. But one judge dissented: Amy Coney Barrett, who thought that while the prosecution had indeed violated the defendant’s rights in a way that cast doubt on the verdict, it was not unreasonable for the state court to conclude that they hadn’t violated his rights in a way that cast doubt on the verdict. (If that sentence sounds absurd to you then you probably haven’t been to law school.)


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In Biegert v. Molitor, et al., Barrett dealt with the case of a mentally ill man shot to death by police. The man’s mother had called 911 for help because she was concerned he was going to kill himself. When police arrived, they created a disastrous situation by acting like cops instead of counselors, demanding he put his hands behind his back and subject himself to a pat down. The man became agitated and attacked the cops, who then shot him dead. Barrett concluded the shooting was reasonable, looking at the attack on the officers itself rather than the officers’ actions that precipitated it.

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Against Prisoners — In John McCottrell, et al. v. Marcus White, et al., two prisoners sued the federal government because their guards had shot them with shotguns. Some inmates were fighting in the dining hall, and the guards fired their guns in the direction of the crowd as “warning shots” but ended up—shockingly—hitting people. The Seventh Circuit ruled that their claims could go forward. But Barrett dissented, saying that the question regarding firing shotguns in the direction of the prisoners was: “was it to maintain discipline or for the satisfaction of hurting the prisoner?” Unless the guard “intentionally appl[ied] force to a prisoner” he could not be “malicious and sadistic” enough to be legally liable for shooting the prisoner. Note how easy it is for prison guards to get away with misconduct under Barrett’s view. So long as they were trying to “maintain discipline” rather than doing it for their “satisfaction” (extremely difficult to prove) then they could mangle detainees endlessly without incurring liability.

In another horrible case, Williams v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc. a prisoner sued the private contractor that provided medical services in the penitentiary. The company had refused to give him cataract surgery based on its “one good eye” policy, which said that so long as one of your eyes still functioned they would not try to stop you from going blind in the other one. In 2011, Williams had developed a cataract in his left eye. Doctors recommended extraction surgery and “warned that without this operation… they would be unable to detect other vision-threatening conditions such as glaucoma.” But since he still had “one good eye,” he couldn’t get the surgery, and Williams’ “vision deteriorated until he was completely blind in [the left eye],” and developed symptoms including “dizziness, acute pain, photophobia, and the feeling that grit or some other substance was in his eye.” He then developed a cataract in his right eye, but Wexford said he still “did not qualify for surgery under Wexford’s policy, because he was not yet blind (or nearly so) in the right eye.” After five years of deteriorating vision with no surgery, Williams filed a grievance. It was denied. He filed another. It was also denied. He appealed the denial. The appeal was not granted. He filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that he should have filed a third, different kind of grievance (the “standard” rather than “emergency” grievance). He appealed. The appeal was granted, and the court found that he had done enough to go through the appropriate process. Only Amy Coney Barrett disagreed. Though concurring in the judgment on technical procedural grounds, she thought he had failed to “exhaust” the grievance process. In her opinion, Williams should have spent more time trying, while going blind, to navigate the Kafkaesque prison paperwork nightmare. Nowhere do any of the judges express any deep sense of concern or urgency about Williams’ deteriorating vision, or the health company’s insane and barbaric policy.