Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked her colleagues on Monday with a solo dissent, saying she "cannot fathom" the majority's decision in a case.
Brown Jackson criticized the high court's decision in the District of Columbia v. R.W. to reverse a lower court decision that said a police officer had violated the Fourth Amendment by stopping a person without reasonable suspicion, MS NOW reported. The justices wrote in an unsigned per curiam opinion that the D.C. appeals court's previous ruling had failed to consider the "totality of circumstances."
In the dissent, she referred to the “assessment of which particular facts to weigh and to what extent, I cannot fathom why that kind of factbound determination warranted correction by this Court.”
Jonathan Turley, law professor, columnist and analyst, described the scolding dissent.
"Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has issued another sole stinging dissent. In a 7-2 decision (with liberal justice Elena Kagan joining the majority), the Court upheld the authority of police to make a stop based on the totality of the circumstances..." Turley wrote on X. "Jackson wrote that 'I cannot fathom' how the seven justices could second-guess the lower court in rejecting the police claims. She accused her colleagues of mere "wordsmithing." Just for the record, it would be useful to review those words..."
The justice appeared to call out her colleagues' decisions.
"Even if I would have assigned more heft to a particular fact in my own first-instance assessment, I would not wordsmith a lower court in this fashion. In my view, this is not a worthy accomplishment for the unusual step of summary reversal. Therefore, I respectfully dissent," Brown Jackson wrote.