08/13/2026
Sometimes I am proud to be a lawyer. Justice Eddins sets out the Roberts Court legacy. Here is the link to the 91 pages: https://law.justia.com/cases/hawaii/supreme-court/2026/scwc-22-0000740.html. Below pages 71-80.
The case itself involved a man convicted decades ago on forensic evidence that has since been discredited. Hawaii's justices ordered a new trial, concluding that due process required correcting a conviction built on unreliable science. But the opinion quickly expanded beyond the facts of one criminal case, arguing that state courts can no longer rely on the Roberts Court as a trustworthy guide for protecting constitutional rights.
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Granillo v. State of Hawaiʻi, (2026) opinion by Justice Eddins,
J. at pages 71-80.
We are not side-stepping anything. We are doing what state
constitutionalism asks us to do. Stand our ground.
The concurrence seizes on the federal precedent the Texas
court’s concurring judge cited. The United States Supreme Court
has “never held that an unknowing use of false evidence violates
due process,” that judge wrote. Warner, 721 S.W.3d at 443
(Finley, J., concurring). The concurrence also cites Glossip v.
Oklahoma, 604 U.S. 226 (2025), as confirming a knowledge
requirement. But Glossip addressed a knowing-use case. It
involved a prosecutor who knew. Id. at 228. It did not
confront what shakes out when an entire branch of forensic
science collapses.
That statement is not a boundary. Glossip described the
precedent as it stood. It did not shut the door on cases like
this one.
The concurrence’s insistence that the prosecution’s
knowledge concession in Butler counsels adoption of Stone in
this context, like its reliance on Glossip, ultimately depends
on the premise that federal constitutional doctrine controls
this court’s interpretation of article I, section 5. It does
not.
We interpret the Hawaiʻi Constitution on its own terms. The
United States Supreme Court’s construction of the federal Due
Process Clause does not define the protections of our state’s
due process clause. This court “reason[s] independently,
untethered from the Supreme Court’s analysis of the United
States Constitution.” State v. Wilson, 154 Hawaiʻi 8, 14, 543
P.3d 440, 446 (2024).
The Court that now defines federal due process does not
honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857. The work
of 1896. The Constitution must be interpreted “according to its
true intent and meaning when it was adopted.” Dred Scott v.
Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 405 (1857).
Today’s hubristic originalists use the same method to
control modern life. See City & Cnty. of Honolulu v. Sunoco LP,
153 Hawaiʻi 326, 361, 537 P.3d 1173, 1208 (2023) (Eddins, J.,
concurring) (“A justice’s personal values and ideas about the
very old days suddenly control the lives of present and future
generations.”).
The Court overrides what Congress passed. It overrides
what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.
What this Court has done to constitutional rights,
democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why
Hawaiʻi’s Constitution takes no instruction from it.
Article I, section 5 provides versatile and sovereign
protection. This court does not anchor Hawaiʻi’s due process
rights to the federal floor. Especially one that keeps sinking.
We take no guidance on the meaning of due process from a
court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022). Zuffante called it
straight. Dobbs erased a “generations-long constitutional
right, stripping autonomy from half the population, and
empowering states to force birth.” State v. Zuffante, 157
Hawaiʻi 194, 200, 576 P.3d 243, 249 (2025).
Article I, section 5 does not import that results-driven
approach to due process. We follow principles, not agendas.
The Supreme Court’s imperious ideology does not stop at due
process. The same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself.
Start with the Voting Rights Act.
The Roberts Court did what Congress never would. It
rewrote the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a cornerstone of American
civil rights, democratically enacted and repeatedly
reauthorized. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013),
began the judicial demolition, inventing a textually unsupported
equal-sovereignty fiction and striking down preclearance on a
hunch that the law worked too well. Brnovich v. Democratic
National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), fabricated “guideposts”
nowhere in Section 2 to greenlight racial discrimination in
voting. Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___, 146 S. Ct. 1131
(Apr. 29, 2026), buried what remained of the crown jewel of the
civil rights movement. Pretend law for a real statute.
The Court then ditched its own thirty-two day default for
releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a
favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years.
Callais v. Louisiana, 608 U.S. __ , 146 S. Ct. 1111, 1113 (May
4, 2026) (Jackson, J., dissenting). Weeks later, on its shadow
docket, the Court tossed an eleven-day trial record built on
fifty-one witnesses, 790 exhibits, 2,600 pages of testimony, and
a 270-page opinion by a three-judge court. See Singleton v.
Allen, 782 F. Supp. 3d 1092, 1115, 1355 (N.D. Ala. 2025). It
resurrected a tainted congressional map the three-judge
factfinders found deliberately entrenched racial bias against
Black voters. Allen v. Milligan, 608 U.S. ___, 146 S. Ct. 1377
(June 2, 2026); see also Hilo Bay Marina, LLC v. State, 156
Hawaiʻi 478, 516, 575 P.3d 568, 606 (2025) (The “Court’s frequent misrepresentation of the factual record and its throw-judges-under-the-bus disdain for district courts, the fact-finders of the federal judiciary, harm the justice system.”).
The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to
acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to
protect. The freed people, their descendants, and all others
denied equal citizenship. U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. It
turns its back on what is in plain sight. The Fourteenth
Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.
The Court calls the Constitution colorblind while
engineering the dilution of Black votes, the unraveling of hard-
fought civil rights remedies, and the erasure of Black
history. That is not blindness. That is white sight, by
design.
A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It
is whatever the Court needs it to be. A way to advance its
partisan project. The damage to democracy extends beyond the
Voting Rights Act.
In Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310
(2010), the Court claimed fidelity to text, history, and
tradition while invalidating yet another democratically vetted
law, handing corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and-
blood Americans and letting dollars talk louder than voters.
See Sunoco, 153 Hawaiʻi at 362, 537 P.3d at 1209 (Eddins, J.,
concurring) (originalism applies selectively and vanishes
inconveniently); Leo E. Strine, Jr. & Nicholas Walter,
Originalist or Original: The Difficulties of Reconciling
Citizens United with Corporate Law History, 91 Notre Dame L.
Rev. 877 (2016) (Citizens United cannot be reconciled with
corporate law history).
Other decisions followed. The Court abandoned partisan
gerrymandering to the gerrymanderers, refusing for the first
time to remedy a constitutional violation because it believed
the task beyond judicial competence. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588
U.S. 684 (2019); see id. at 721 (Kagan, J., dissenting). It
placed a president above the law. Trump v. United States, 603
U.S. 593 (2024).
Election Comm’n, 609 U.S. ___ (June 30, 2026), made Citizens
United look quaint, shredding coordinated spending limits
Last month, Nat’l Republican Senatorial Comm. v. Fed.
Congress had enacted, and ensuring that those who bankroll
elections drown out the ordinary person. Billionaires spend to
be repaid. Everyone else just votes. The Roberts Court has
made sure one’s wealth counts more than another’s vote.
Rulings run in one direction, time after time. Weakening
protections for those with less power. Fortifying those with
more. The pattern speaks for itself. A court that
systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls
constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not
chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution.
Our constitutional system was designed for times like
these. Federalism is not a formality. It is the architecture.
The framers built dual sovereignty into the structure of
American government as an independent check against concentrated federal power. A Supreme Court driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people is exactly what that check was built for.
When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to
protect, state constitutions hold the line. That is not
defiance. That is the design.
State constitutionalism makes it easy to consider Roberts
Court jurisprudence “white noise.” See Hilo Bay Marina, 156
Hawaiʻi at 518, 575 P.3d at 608.
Add it all up. Draining due process. Rolling back voting
rights. Flooding elections with money. Rubber-stamping
gerrymandering. Crowning a president. Blessing discrimination
in the name of the Constitution. Fulton v. City of
Philadelphia, Pa., 593 U.S. 522 (2021); 303 Creative LLC v.
Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023). Looking at naked racism and seeing
none of it. Mullin v. Doe, 609 U.S. ___ (June 25, 2026) (racist
words not “overtly racial”). Making the country more dangerous
with a Second Amendment unmoored from text or history and
unrecognizable to the framers who wrote it. New York State
Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022); Wilson,
154 Hawaiʻi at 22, 543 P.3d at 454 (“disabl[ing] the states’
responsibility to protect public safety, reduce gun violence,
and safeguard peaceful public movement” with its deadly
jurisprudence). Then striking down a careful law and showing
disdain for Hawaiʻi’s constitutional traditions. Wolford v.
Lopez, 609 U.S. ___ (June 25, 2026).
Subverting congressional choices with a homemade “major
questions” power grab that plays “get-out-of-text-free cards” to
block agencies from doing what Congress told them to do. West
Virginia v. Env’t Prot. Agency, 597 U.S. 697, 779 (2022) (Kagan,
J., dissenting). Then commandeering the interpretive authority
Congress gave federal agencies, overruling Chevron after forty
years because, to this particular Court, precedent is advisory.
Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024).
This term, transmuting federal spending programs into
private contracts, the Court forged the Spending Clause to
“reduce[] some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements.”
Landor v. Louisiana Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, 609 U.S. ___
(June 23, 2026) (Jackson, J., dissenting). Days later, it freed
the President to fire at will the very commissioners a law
shielded from removal, discarding a unanimous opinion,
Humphrey’s Executor, on a cherry-picked slice of history - a
century of settled practice recast as a mistake, competent
governance sacrificed to the partisan cause. Trump v.
Slaughter, 609 U.S. ___ (June 29, 2026). The next morning,
fair-weather textualists – living constitution originalists,
really - deserted the text and our nation’s history the moment
it promised citizenship, one vote from writing that right out of
the Constitution. Trump v. Barbara, 609 U.S. ___ (June 30,
2026).
That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have
produced lately. But it’s enough.
Article I, section 5 needs no part of this. The Hawaiʻi
Constitution was built to stand on its own. And so it does.
We hold that prosecution knowledge is not required to
invoke the false evidence standard under article I, section 5.
The concurrence pushes harmless beyond a reasonable doubt
because, in its view, materiality is too generous. That
criticism mistakes the function each standard serves.
Harmless beyond a reasonable doubt asks how strong the
State’s other evidence looks once the constitutional error is
set aside. Could the conviction stand without the tainted
testimony? If yes, the error is harmless. The inquiry centers
on the strength of what remains.
Materiality asks a different question. Could the false
testimony have affected the jury’s judgment? The focus is not
on what remains in the State’s case. It is on what the false
evidence may have done to the verdict the jury actually
returned.
The constitutional violation under article I, section 5 is
a verdict built on false evidence, not weakness of the State’s
case. That is why materiality is the better fit. It asks the
constitutional question. Harmless beyond a reasonable doubt
asks a sufficiency
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