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from the we-won't-hear-the-case,-but-if-we-could... dept.
The Washington Post has some analysis of a noteworthy Supreme Court non-decision.
In today's [March 6] Leonard v. Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas sharply criticizes civil forfeiture laws. The one-justice opinion discusses the Supreme Court's refusing to hear the case (a result Thomas agrees with, for procedural reasons mentioned in the last paragraph); but Thomas is sending a signal, I think, that at least one justice — and maybe more — will be sympathetic to such arguments in future cases.
From Justice Thomas' statement:
In rem proceedings often enable the government to seize the property without any predeprivation judicial process and to obtain forfeiture of the property even when the owner is personally innocent (though some statutes, including the one here, provide for an innocent-owner defense). Civil proceedings often lack certain procedural protections that accompany criminal proceedings, such as the right to a jury trial and a heightened standard of proof.
Partially as a result of this distinct legal regime, civil forfeiture has in recent decades become widespread and highly profitable.
[...] These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 17 2017, @05:34PM
While it's a few years out of date, I'd suggest this article [slate.com] for some examples of where Thomas sided with liberals. Stats and breakdowns for rulings are easily found on SCOTUSblog too, so you can look up the other weird alliances between Thomas and some liberal justices.
Basically, Thomas is rather kooky and adheres so strongly to certain principles that he sometimes ends up on the "liberal" side of a case. Of course, part of the problem is the one-dimensional political spectrum metaphor -- in reality, there are many possible positions and a lot of inconsistency in the stereotypical "conservative" and "liberal" positions. Thomas is definitely a bit of a wildcard in some cases, though not necessarily because he's "liberal" in some areas -- he's generally so conservative in some sort of wacky way that he ends up swapping sides. (There are a couple high-profile cases where Thomas actually has gone with the liberals for more "stereotypically liberal" reasons -- the most prominent one I can think of was the cross-burning case from the early 2000s, where Thomas basically viewed cross burning as a form of "hate speech" that could be outlawed, though he didn't use that term. But you're right that those sort of cases for him are rare.)