Actually, at least in the realm of non-constitutional decision-making, the argument for courts respecting precedent is often made on democratic grounds. Once a precedent has been made, legislatures write laws based on that precedent. Not only do other laws then depend on that precedent but if those legislatures do not change the law, there is in some sense a democratic acceptance of the court decision. For courts to overrule such long-standing precedents is to act no differently from a legislative amendment.
Actually on that note, there was an interesting case yesterday that split the Court on unsual non-ideological grounds but over this exact question of the treatment of legal precedent. Thomas and Scalia actually voted to overturn a death penalty conviction because of a common law precedent barring conviction if a victim lived more than a year. The Tennessee court ignored its own state precedents and the inmate sued, arguing that discarding the precedent was a violation of due process. The majority of the Court upheld the conviction, since they argued that the precedent was a relic of the past.
This is actually one case where the Justices were actually divided on legal grounds rather than pure political ones- interesting just because of its rarity on this Court.
Nathan Newman
====
Monday May 14 2:02 PM ET Court Upholds Tenn. Death Conviction
By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Tennessee killer whose victim lived 15 months after being stabbed lost his Supreme Court case Monday.
The court ruled 5-4 that a Tennessee court acted properly when it said that the state's old ``year-and-a-day'' rule for homicide prosecutions did not apply to Wilbert K. Rogers' case.
``The year-and-a-day rule is widely viewed as an outdated relic of the common law,'' Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (news - web sites) wrote for the majority.
Prosecutors say Rogers stabbed James Bowdery in the chest on May 7, 1994. Shortly afterward, Bowdery suffered a heart attack and brain damage. He survived in a vegetative state until August 1995, when he died of a kidney infection related to the coma.
Rogers was convicted in Shelby County of second-degree murder and sentenced to 33 years in prison.
He fought the conviction on grounds that Tennessee had a common law tradition that a death more than 366 days after an assault cannot be considered a homicide.
The year-and-a-day rule dates to 1907 and is based on Medieval English law, but is not part of the state's formal homicide laws.
The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld Rogers' conviction. The court said the year-and-a-day tradition did not apply to Rogers, and went on to declare the rule invalid.
Rogers claimed the state court violated his 14th Amendment guarantee of due process in court by retroactively applying its 1999 invalidation of the year-and-a-day rule to his 1994 case.
But Rogers' due process rights were not violated, because the eventual demise of the year-and-a-day rule was foreseeable, O'Connor wrote for the high court majority.
Other courts have noted that advances in medicine and science ``have so undermined the usefulness of the rule as to render it without question obsolete,'' she wrote.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David Souter (news - web sites) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites) joined O'Connor.
Justices John Paul Stevens (news - web sites), Antonin Scalia (news - web sites), Clarence Thomas (news - web sites) and Stephen Breyer (news - web sites) filed three separate, overlapping dissents.
The case is Rogers v. Tennessee, 99-6218
-