A sitting state Supreme Court justice just used an official legal opinion to call the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority racists and announce that Hawaii plans to ignore their rulings.
Legal scholars are calling it one of the most extraordinary departures from judicial norms in recent memory — and the left-wing media is cheering it on.
But the judge behind this 91-page screed has a history of this kind of thing, and the question now is whether anyone in a position of authority will do anything about it.
What Justice Eddins Actually Wrote
Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins issued the opinion in Granillo v. State of Hawaii, a criminal case involving a 1990 sexual assault conviction that the court unanimously vacated due to discredited FBI hair-and-fiber forensic evidence.
In May 1989, Daniel R. Granillo was accused of abducting a woman from a Maui shopping center parking lot after her boyfriend abandoned her. The alleged victim testified that Granillo grabbed her, held a knife to her neck, drove her to the Kahului breakwater, and sexually assaulted her. She escaped by jumping from the moving car and was found hysterical, with bruises on her face, thigh, and arm.
Granillo was convicted in July 1990 on kidnapping, two counts of first-degree sexual assault, and attempted first-degree sexual assault. He received 40 years.
While the court unanimously vacated the conviction, it actually divided 3-2 over the standard. The majority ruled that the false-evidence standard applied under the state constitution when prosecutors knowingly present untrue testimony, holding that all that is required is that there is a “reasonable possibility” that the challenged evidence influenced the vote of any juror.
That was the legitimate legal issue before the court. Then Eddins kept writing.
In the blistering 91-page opinion, Justice Eddins and his colleagues declared that Hawaii interprets its constitution “independently, untethered from the Supreme Court’s analysis of the United States Constitution.” They chose to treat the binding rulings of the nation’s highest court as something to be dismissed rather than followed.
Reasonable minds can disagree on that standard, but the opinion suddenly veers off into a completely gratuitous and irrelevant attack on the integrity of the United States Supreme Court.
Eddins called the conservative justices “hubristic originalists” who are “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.” He declared that a Supreme Court “that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity does not chart the course for the Hawaii Constitution” and that “a Supreme Court driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people is exactly what that check was built for.”
And then he went further.
“The Roberts Court sees only white,” Eddins charged. “That is not blindness,” the opinion continued. “That is white sight, by design.”
State constitutionalism, he wrote, makes it easy to consider Roberts Court jurisprudence “white noise.”
Legal Experts Push Back Hard
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley did not hold back.
“It is an appalling departure from judicial restraint and decorum,” Turley told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Lines such as ‘The Roberts Court sees only white’ would make an MSNBC commentator blush. This is nothing more than an unserious screed rather than a reasoned opinion.”
Turley also put the opinion in its proper legal context. It has been 210 years since Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) held that the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over state court rulings. It has been roughly 170 years since the Court ruled in Ableman v. Booth (1858) that state courts cannot overrule or obstruct judgments of the federal courts.
Justice Eddins and his colleagues are not declaring a judicial insurrection but rather a form of passive aggression, a pledge to minimize any orders from a Court described as “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.”
Turley put it plainly on social media: “The Hawaii Supreme Court just issued a disgraceful attack on the United States Supreme Court that paints the majority as enemies of constitutional rights as well as presumptive racists.”
And Turley is not alone in that read. The opinion by Justice Todd W. Eddins is devoid of judicial restraint and decorum. The fact that other justices would join in such an unhinged screed is a disgrace to the court and the Hawaii bar.
But the left-wing press celebrated it. Slate called Eddins the judge with “the guts” to denounce the Court, framing the partisan rant as courageous truth-telling. Legal pundits like Mark Stern, who covers the Supreme Court for Slate, heralded Eddins as “the one judge who has the guts” to denounce the Court.
This Is Not Eddins’ First Rodeo
Anyone surprised by this opinion hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in Hawaii’s courts for years.
In a 2024 ruling involving a person charged with illegally carrying a firearm, the Hawaii Supreme Court invoked the “spirit of Aloha” while ignoring Supreme Court precedents, including New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
In State v. Wilson, Justice Eddins wrote that while the Hawaii Constitution “mirrors” the Second Amendment, “We read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court,” adding, “We hold that in Hawaii there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.”
The US Supreme Court later struck down Hawaii’s related gun restriction. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that the Hawaii regime “impose[s] severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the state’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit,” and that it “hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”
Hawaii lost. Eddins kept writing opinions that treat that loss as irrelevant.
The Hawaii Supreme Court directly challenged the Supreme Court over Bruen and Wolford, accusing the high court of “[m]aking the country more dangerous with a Second Amendment unmoored from text or history and unrecognizable to the framers who wrote it.”
And in a 2025 case involving police interrogations, Eddins’ opinion took direct shots at the current conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, pitting its jurisprudence against the guarantees the state constitution can provide. The Hawaii Constitution’s due process clause “offers safety to Hawaii’s people that exceeds the federal constitution’s suddenly fluid protections,” Eddins wrote.
The pattern is consistent. Eddins treats every case as an opportunity to write a political broadside against the justices who were appointed by Republican presidents and confirmed by the US Senate.
What This Actually Means for the Rule of Law
Put aside the theatrics for a second and consider what Eddins is actually proposing. A state court justice, writing in an official legal opinion, tells the people of Hawaii that the US Supreme Court’s rulings are “white noise” — background noise to be tuned out rather than binding law to be followed.
That’s not an academic exercise. That’s a sitting judge telling litigants, lawyers, and lower courts that the constitutional hierarchy doesn’t apply in Hawaii when he disagrees with the outcome.
Eddins has a legal argument buried somewhere in there — state constitutions can sometimes offer broader protections than the federal Constitution, and state courts do have real authority to interpret their own state’s law. That’s a legitimate principle. But that principle doesn’t give a state court justice license to call the Chief Justice of the United States a racist in an official opinion, declare SCOTUS rulings to be “white noise,” and announce that his court will simply stop taking instruction from the nation’s highest court.
And the timing matters. The left is actively hunting for institutional footholds to resist rulings it dislikes — on guns, on elections, on executive power. A state court that publicly signals it will treat SCOTUS as optional becomes a magnet for exactly that kind of resistance. Eddins knows this. The opinion reads less like a legal ruling than a recruitment document.
The left-wing press calling this “courageous” is telling. When a conservative lower court judge pushes back on a precedent they dislike, the same outlets demand impeachment and lecture everyone about the sanctity of judicial hierarchy. When a left-wing state justice calls the entire conservative majority of the US Supreme Court racists in an official opinion and pledges to treat their rulings as background noise, suddenly that’s bravery.
But the legal structure doesn’t care about Eddins’ feelings about the Roberts Court. It has been 210 years since Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) held that the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over state court rulings. It has been roughly 170 years since the Court ruled in Ableman v. Booth (1858) that state courts cannot overrule or obstruct judgments of the federal courts.
Those cases weren’t written to be convenient. They exist because a constitutional republic cannot function if every state court gets to decide which federal rulings it will honor. That’s not federalism. That’s fracture.
And Eddins, for all his bluster about the “people’s” power, didn’t ask the people of Hawaii anything. He wrote a 91-page political manifesto and called it a legal opinion. The people of Hawaii will deal with the consequences when their gun laws get struck down again, their criminal convictions get challenged under novel standards, and their courts earn a reputation as places where the law is whatever the majority of five justices happen to believe on a given day.
That’s not constitutionalism. That’s exactly what Eddins claims to be fighting against.
Sources: Fox News; Jonathan Turley, jonathanturley.org; Daily Caller News Foundation; The Gateway Pundit; NBC News; The Hill; Bolts Magazine; Daily Wire; Raw Story; Slate; Alternet