WASHINGTON — Over the last 15 years, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has made it nearly impossible to win constitutional claims of unequal treatment.
To succeed, the court has ruled, claimants must prove that government officials were biased and engaged in blatant discrimination. This high threshold is rarely crossed.
That is why many legal experts were taken aback this week when the high court relied on the equal protection clause to stop the manual recount of presidential ballots in Florida.
No one had alleged that the judges who would supervise the recounts were motivated by discriminatory bias.
Nonetheless, the claim proved to be a winner for lawyers representing Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
"We find a violation of the equal protection clause," the conservative majority said in Bush vs. Gore, because the recount process lacked the "procedural safeguards" to assure that counties would not treat unread ballots differently.
Until this week the court had consistently turned away equal protection claims, even when confronted with strong allegations of racial bias.
When defense lawyers challenged Georgia's death-penalty system as racially biased, they cited studies showing that murders involving whites were 11 times more likely to result in a death sentence than murders of blacks.
But on a 5-4 vote, the court in 1987 rejected that claim, ruling that the statistics did not prove that the Georgia officials were biased.
Rehnquist Rejects Drug Case Study
Four years ago, public defenders in Los Angeles alleged a pattern of bias in federal drug prosecutions. They said that during one year every person charged with a federal crack cocaine offense was black. A federal judge then ordered a study of drug cases in the U.S. attorney's office and cleared the way for the defense lawyers to question prosecutors.
But Rehnquist, speaking for the high court, overturned that order and quashed the study based on what he called "ordinary equal protection standards. . . . The claimant must demonstrate that the federal prosecutorial policy had a discriminatory effect and was motivated by a discriminatory purpose."
Since the public defenders had no proof in advance that U.S. attorneys in Los Angeles were biased, they were not entitled to the study, he said.
The gap between the court's usual approach and this week's ruling has caused both debate and some despair among legal scholars.
