1987—In an unspeakably brutal crime, Donald Middlebrooks (a 24-year-old white male) and two accomplices kidnap Kerrick Majors, a 14-year-old black youth, decide to “have some fun” with him, tie his hands, and take him into the woods. There, according to Middlebrooks’s videotaped confession, one accomplice, Roger Brewington, beats Majors with brass knuckles, hits him with a stick, and urinates into his mouth; Middlebrooks slaps Majors and hits him with a switch; and the other accomplice burns his nose with a cigarette lighter. Brewington then abuses Majors’s private parts, beats and gags him, and slashes his wrist. Middlebrooks asks Brewington to stop and initially refuses Brewington’s direction to stab Majors. But after Brewington stabs Majors, Middlebrooks does so as well. Majors dies at the end of the 3-1/2 hour ordeal.
Middlebrooks is convicted of first-degree felony-murder and aggravated kidnapping and is sentenced to death. On appeal, the Tennessee supreme court, by a 3 to 2 vote, vacates the death sentence. In a separate opinion, Chief Justice Lyle Reid, joined by Justice Martha Craig Daughtrey, goes even further, opining that the imposition of the death penalty for a conviction of felony-murder is cruel and unusual punishment under the state constitution. (The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected that conclusion under the Eighth Amendment.) Perceiving themselves as part of the enlightened elite charged with overriding the riff-raff’s benighted views, Reid and Daughtrey condemn the death penalty generally: “Implicit in death penalty jurisprudence is the recognition that the standards of decency are not static but evolving, that society is not stale but maturing, and that the level of community morality will continue to rise until the reasoned moral response of the people of Tennessee will be, if it is not already, that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment.” Ah, yes, in the eyes of the liberal judicial activist, no one exercising mature moral reasoning could possibly believe that the brutality inflicted on Kerrick Majors would call for the death penalty as a response.
In 1993, Daughtrey’s credentials as a liberal judicial activist earn her President Clinton’s appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Meanwhile, on remand, Middlebrooks is again sentenced to death. In 1999—twelve years after Majors’s brutal death—the Tennessee supreme court, with Reid and Daughtrey no longer serving on it, unanimously upholds the death sentence.
2019— The Kansas supreme court rules (in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt) that the declaration in section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights, dating from 1859, that “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means that any restriction on abortion must be subjected to strict scrutiny (rather than the more permissive “undue burden” standard that the U.S. Supreme Court misread into the federal Constitution in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992).
The ruling comes in a challenge to a Kansas law, enacted in 2015, that prohibits use of the dilation-and-evacuation (D&E) method of abortion except where necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. D&E is the most common method of abortion in the second trimester. In his opinions in the partial-birth abortion cases (Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) and Gonzales v. Carhart (2007)), Justice Kennedy described what ordinary D&E entails (in order to distinguish it from partial-birth abortion, which is a variant of D&E). In his solo dissent, Justice Caleb Stegall quotes Justice Kennedy’s descriptions:
The [D&E] procedure “requires the abortionist to use instruments to grasp a portion (such as a foot or hand) of a developed and living fetus and drag the grasped portion out of the uterus into the vagina.” Using the resistance “created by the opening between the uterus and vagina” the “grasped portion” is torn “away from the remainder of the body.” “For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman.” The baby then “bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.” The child “can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” The heartbeat can continue even “with ‘extensive parts of the fetus removed.’” “At the conclusion of a D&E abortion . . . the abortionist is left with ‘a tray full of pieces.’”
Six members of the Kansas supreme court would have you believe that a mother has a “natural right” to have her child killed in this way.
In his lengthy and impressive dissent, Justice Stegall castigates the majority for “abandon[ing] the original public meaning of section 1” and for “paint[ing] the interest in unborn life championed by millions of Kansans as rooted in an ugly prejudice.”