A Hawaii Supreme Court justice devoted eight pages of a criminal ruling to declaring his court will not follow the U.S. Supreme Court's constitutional interpretations, weeks after the justices struck down the state's concealed carry restrictions.
Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins used a 91-page majority opinion in State v. Granillo, a case about a 1990 rape conviction, to launch an extended attack on the Roberts court. The core ruling ordered a new trial for a Maui man after the court found that hair and fiber evidence an FBI expert presented at his original trial relied on forensic science since discredited. That part of the opinion was narrow and unremarkable. What followed was not.
Eddins wrote that Hawaii courts should not look to the U.S. Supreme Court when interpreting the state's own constitution, arguing it offers stronger protections than the federal document as the current court reads it. He accused the justices of abandoning the civil rights principles behind Brown v. Board of Education and reviving the reasoning of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 ruling denying citizenship to Black Americans, and Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that blessed racial segregation. He claimed the Roberts court's approach to individual rights has drifted so far from the founding generation's understanding that state courts have not just the freedom but the obligation to chart their own path.
The timing was not incidental. Eddins is the same justice who wrote the court's February 2024 opinion in State v. Wilson, which upheld Hawaii's restrictions on carrying firearms in public despite the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That decision required gun laws to be judged against a historical tradition of firearms regulation, a test the Hawaii court openly mocked, writing that it saw "no need to import a mainland, and in particular a Texas, standard" into the state's approach to public safety. The Wilson opinion invoked the "spirit of Aloha" and Hawaii's own colonial-era weapons restrictions to justify the carry limits, drawing national attention and sharp criticism from Second Amendment advocates who said the court was simply defying binding precedent.
That criticism escalated further up the chain. Gun rights groups petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review Wilson, and in June the justices vacated the Hawaii ruling and sent it back for reconsideration in light of United States v. Rahimi, the Court's decision on domestic violence restraining orders and gun possession. Rather than treat that as a rebuke, Eddins used the Granillo opinion, issued weeks later, to double down. Legal scholars who track state constitutional law say the move fits into a decades-old movement known as "new judicial federalism," in which state supreme courts interpret their own constitutions independently of, and sometimes more expansively than, the U.S. Constitution. State courts have long had that authority in theory. What is unusual is a justice framing the divergence as a moral necessity and invoking slavery-era and Jim Crow-era rulings to make the point in a case that had nothing to do with guns or civil rights history.
Reaction from the legal community has split along familiar lines. Civil liberties scholars sympathetic to expansive state constitutional protections have praised Eddins for candor, arguing that state courts have too often deferred reflexively to Washington even when their own constitutions' text and history point elsewhere. Critics, including several conservative legal commentators and at least one dissenting Hawaii justice in earlier rulings, have called the language intemperate for a judicial opinion and warned that comparing the current Supreme Court to the authors of Dred Scott and Plessy undermines the perception of judicial restraint the opinion claims to embody. Hawaii's attorney general's office has not commented on the constitutional commentary embedded in Granillo, focusing public statements instead on the retrial ordered for the defendant.
The practical stakes reach beyond one Maui case. Hawaii is one of a handful of states, along with California, New York and New Jersey, where state courts have resisted post-Bruen challenges to gun regulations, and legal observers expect the doctrine Eddins outlined in Granillo to resurface directly when Wilson returns to the state court on remand. If the Hawaii Supreme Court reissues a ruling that again diverges from the federal historical-tradition test, the case is widely expected to draw a second petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, setting up a more direct confrontation over how much independence state courts truly have when a state constitution's protections run parallel to, but are interpreted differently than, their federal counterparts. For now, Eddins' opinion stands as one of the most pointed public breaks between a state high court and the Roberts court in recent memory, and one likely to be cited, for better or worse, the next time a state judge wants to explain why Washington does not get the last word.
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