AFPI Asks SCOTUS to Consider Discipline of Three Hawaii Justices Over ‘White Sight’ Opinion

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) today filed a letter with the clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court asking the Court to consider disciplinary proceedings under Supreme Court Rule 8 against three justices of the Hawaii Supreme Court, each believed to be a member of the Supreme Court’s Bar.

The letter concerns Granillo v. State, a 91-page opinion issued July 15, authored by Justice Todd W. Eddins and joined by Chief Justice Vladimir P. Devens and Justice Sabrina S. McKenna. The case set a new Hawaii standard for postconviction relief when forensic evidence presented at trial is later shown to be false. AFPI’s letter takes no issue with that state-law holding. It concerns the roughly eight pages that follow it—pages the letter describes as “a sweeping attack on the integrity of the United States Supreme Court and its justices” across abortion, voting rights, campaign finance, partisan gerrymandering, presidential immunity, religious liberty, firearms regulation, administrative law, agency removal, federal spending programs, and birthright citizenship—none of it related to the case before the Hawaii court.

Among the lines the letter quotes, the Granillo majority wrote of the Supreme Court:

“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 Roberts Court sees only white.”

“That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design.”

“When six justices walk away from those they are supposed to protect, state constitutions hold the line.”

“That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately. But it’s enough.”

The opinion tells readers the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence may be treated as “white noise.” It accuses “six Justices” of “engineering the dilution of Black votes,” “shredding” democratically enacted laws, “crown[ing] a president,” “blessing discrimination,” “looking at naked racism and seeing none of it,” and sacrificing “competent governance” to a “partisan cause.”

“Any judge in America is free to criticize the Supreme Court legal analysis in a given case, in an opinion or anywhere else, and to do it in the strongest terms,” said Leigh Ann O’Neill, AFPI’s chief legal affairs officer. “These three justices did something else. They used a precedential opinion of a state’s highest court to accuse the justices of deliberate racism and partisan corruption, on matters that had nothing to do with the case in front of them, and invited the country to treat the Supreme Court’s rulings as ‘white noise.’ No legal system survives judges teaching the public that the courts above them are illegitimate.”

Rule 8 authorizes the Supreme Court to discipline a member of its Bar for “conduct unbecoming a member of the Bar,” a standard the Court has said reaches conduct “inimical to the administration of justice.” The letter asks the Court to confirm that the three justices are members of its Bar and, if so, to determine whether the Hawaii justices’ statements in the Granillo opinion violate ethical rules the justices agreed to in swearing their oath and joining the Supreme Court Bar. Enforcement authority rests solely with the Court.

The letter grounds the request in the settled duty of state courts to follow the Supreme Court on questions of federal law, along with a 2025 opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.” It also cites Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, which named “defiance of judgments lawfully entered by courts of competent jurisdiction” among the principal threats facing the judiciary.

There is precedent for disciplining a sitting judge over attacks on the Court’s integrity. In 2020, the Judicial Council of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals publicly admonished U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman over a law review article that accused the Supreme Court of “undermining American democracy.”

“A federal judicial council publicly admonished a sitting judge for making a version of these accusations in a law review article,” O’Neill said. “The Granillo majority made them in the pages of published law, under the authority of judicial office. Whether that is conduct becoming of the Supreme Court’s Bar is a question only the Court can answer. Our obligation as members of that Bar is to place it before the Court."

The full letter is available here.