“Until Their Voice Matters …”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s passionate words of dissent resonated across the country — including among criminal-justice reform advocates like New Haven’s Angel Fernandez-Chavero, who saw what can happen when police officers use pretexts to hassle people they don’t like.

Sotomayor issued a dissent Monday in the case of Utah v. Strieff. The court’s majority ruled in the case that ​“the discovery that a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” as Sotomayor put it. Or basically that if a cop stops you for no good reason, then discovers you have a warrant out for a minor offense, then searches your car for drugs, those drugs can be used as evidence to arrest you.

“[N]othing about this case is isolated,” Sotomayor wrote.

“… By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ​‘isolated.’ They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

In her dissent, Sotomayor drew on the daily realities of life for black and brown people in the United States and on the writings of James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates to present a case for how this decision affects the lives of people who look like her. The dissent rocketed across social media and the Internet in general on Tuesday. Ferndandez-Chavero read an extended excerpt from the dissent on an episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Fernandez-Chavero watched what happened for years to his fellow parishioners at St. Rose of Lima Church in Fair Haven — immigrants who were continually harassed and arrested on pretenses by the East Haven police in a crackdown on Latinos. Fernandez-Chavero, a development consultant who was born in Mexico, joined with other congregants to file a federal civil-rights lawsuit that led to a Justice Department investigation into widespread illegal behavior by East Haven cops, and to a forced overhaul of the department.

Sotomayor’s dissent recognized a reality of daily life that Fernandez-Chavero and others fought to change. He saw Monday’s majority ruling in Utah v Strieff as a step backwards in the quest to prevent police misconduct.

“I very much believe this is the greatest country in the world,” Fernandez-Chavero said. ​“But this is extermely disappointing. I don’t think there’s any word in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent that is is inaccurate. No one sohoudl be worried about what they’re doing at any time if they’re innocent.”

Fernandez-Chavero appeared on the radio program along with Connecticut Humanities Council Executive Director Doug Fisher. Fernandez-Chavero serves a a member of the council’s board. They spoke about the unexpected $1.73 million budget cut the council took at the end of the just-completed legislative session, as part of $23 million in line-item vetoes by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. That wiped out two-thirds of the council’s budget — and for now has suspended its ability to make grants to hundreds of community organizations to use the arts to help Connecticut make sense of the world around us.

Click on or upload the above sound file to listen to them discuss the council’s work and efforts to recover its budget, in the full episode of ​“Dateline New Haven.” Fernandez-Chavero reads the Sotomayor excerpt at the beginning of the episode.

And click here to read the full text of the majority and dissenting opinions in the Supreme Court case.