Worst SCOTUS cases

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The correct answer is Miranda v Arizona.

I'm surprised.  I never knew you were an ACLU supporter.  After all, they had argued in that case that a free station-house lawyer should be readily available to the suspect and that instead of being merely advised that they suspects could make use of a lawyer, that they be strongly recommended to make use of one, two positions that the Warren court rejected.

More seriously, I would have thought with your obsession over wasteful spending on public employees, you'd think Gideon v. Wainwright, with its mandate of publicly provided defense attorneys to the indigent in felony cases would be a more serious fault, but perhaps your mania on that subject extends only to public school teachers. (Or maybe I'm confusing you with another poster, in which case I apologize, tho I won't say to whom. )

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It would be far more logical to simply define the 5th amendment as prohibiting coerced confessions and there would be no such need to bypass anything.

Obviously you have never read anything about the Miranda case other than "OMG, why should we tell defendants they can shut up?" The decision was indeed based upon the 5th amendment prohibition of coerced confessions and the finding that pre-Miranda lawyerless questioning was in general coercive and thus any such confession had reasonable doubt attached to it.

Incidentally, Miranda's case was sent back for a retrial in which the prosecution was able to prove its case without his confession.  Confession is good for the soul, but its usefulness in criminal cases is considerably overrated, both because of the cases in which it isn't needed and the cases in which a false confession has been coerced.  Sadly, the history of criminal investigation in both this country and elsewhere shows how badly Miranda is needed.

Unless we were to go to the extreme of video recording a suspect continuously from the moment of being brought in for questioning through the giving of his confession or at least being given something like the Miranda warning, then I'd have to agree with the presumption that any confession given prior to seeing a lawyer is to be considered coerced.  Even with said recording, there would no doubt be constant disputations over whether the recording shows coercion.

Miranda gives a reasonably solid bright line.  Given how rare non-murky Supreme Court rulings are, Miranda deserves to be celebrated not castigated.  It has also caused police departments to improve themselves and not rely on often unreliable confessions. Justice has been improved by Miranda.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Unless we were to go to the extreme of video recording a suspect continuously from the moment of being brought in for questioning through the giving of his confession or at least being given something like the Miranda warning,

"Extreme"?  Minnesota requires video recording of all custodial interrogations.  Alaska apparently has a similar policy.  I think they're a fantastic idea.

I'm talking about more than that, not just recording when they are officially being interrogated.  I'm talking about a continuous video trail from the moment the suspect is taken in by the cops, including all times that he is "officially" left alone so as to prove that is the case.  I'm talking about not even being allowed a private bathroom break.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

With all the other awful decisions listed in the OP, I'm going to put "honorable mention" as Washington vs. Crawford. Mr. "Original Intent" threw out years of Confrontation Clause precedent, ignored reliability guarantees built into the hearsay rules, and destroyed thousands of prosecutions of wife-beaters in the crapper over his fantasy view of the constitution.

I agree that the effect of Crawford v. Washington on domestic abuse cases is unfortunate, but well within the intent of the sixth.  I think rather that the time has come to rethink the issue of spousal privilege.  It is a relic of the days when husband and wife were legally one person, with the wife being the subordinate part of that person.  Of days when marriage were almost always till death did they part.  Those days are long since passed.  Save for being an absolute bar against hearsay evidence, even in circumstances where it might otherwise be admissible, I think it's time to end spousal privilege.

Hence in the case at hand, the wife could be called to the stand to speak of what she saw of the fight, and in the case of a wife-beating case, she could be called to the stand to speak of what happened to her.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Shelby County v. Holder

SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The court gave more than ample warning in the dicta of Northwest Austin that it found the antiquated preclearance formula wanting.  It's a sound decision, albeit an awkward one.  If preclearance is going to be applied selectively to only certain jurisdictions, 40 year old data is not how to do it.

Even if you think it a bad decision, there are plenty of ones you should find worse.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

But the thing with that 40 year old data was that there was a process to escape preclearance. Jurisdictions with a record of not being racist, namely a number of Virginia counties

So they guilty until proven innocent?  That's not the American way.  In many ways the expanded use of section 3 that the DoJ is now engaging in quite appropriate.  Those jurisdictions proven to have enacted electoral laws with a racist effect get to "enjoy" being subjected to preclearance again for a period of time.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Not the American way?  The Constitution does not mandate the Equality of States before the law, but it does mandate the equality of citizens before the law, and it mandates that their right to vote not be breached on account of race, and empowers congress take take action in that respect with 'appropriate legislation.'  You can argue that 1960s data is not 'appropriate,' but to argue that states are 'guilty until innocent' in the eyes of civil rights act is the same as making that argument before a parole board

The problem with your parole board analogy is that the States already served their sentence and then Congress in its 2006 reauthorization of the VRA extended their sentence based on the very same evidence already used before to convict them having enacted racist laws.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

While the effect of the Civil Rights Cases was indeed most dreadful, I think they were rightly decided. Neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendments gave the Federal government authority to interpose itself in private contracts.  While the later Civil Rights Act of 1964 did do much the same thing as the struck down portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, it did so under the aegis of the Commerce Clause which in the decades since 1883 had been interpreted much more broadly than they had been when the Civil Rights Cases were decided.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Actually, I'd say that the core holding of Buck v. Bell is sound.  The problem with eugenics is not primarily the concept itself, but that eugenic principles ended up being broadly applied without any proof that the problem that it was desired to correct was indeed genetic and due process was often severely limited in these cases.  The due process problems were indeed a product of the times.  We do have a better understanding of the science of genetics these days, and eugenics is still very much around and is probably being more broadly applied today than in the interwar period.  The major difference between eugenics then and eugenics now is that the tool of eugenicists then was sterilization and the tool of eugenicists today is abortion.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

United States v California

Which U.S. v. California?  Both the 1936 and the 1947 cases are ones I could see you finding fault with.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

There is probably a special place for decisions which weren't even wrong, but where the Court's reasoning was extremely malicious: the Warren Court tended to uphold good policy using the Commerce Clause in an attempt to underline that legislative power under the Commerce Clause was effectively unlimited, but it's hard to cite those cases since terrible policy has been upheld under the Commerce Clause as well. But Griswold v. Connecticut, a case where the majority opinion goes out of its way to say that the Court can make whatever determinations it wants regardless of the Constitution, has reasoning that's especially noxious, especially given that it would have been extremely easy to say there is a right to privacy or bodily autonomy in the plain language of the Fourth Amendment rather than reaching for penumbras.

Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., decided back in 1911, has to be the worst example of that. The way the Court defended a corporate income tax before the Sixteenth Amendment seems to me to be totally lacking in logic, especially given its striking down of an income tax sixteen years before, although the Flint Court did have eight new members.

Pollock didn't strike down all income taxes, only those such as taxes on rental income that it deemed to be direct taxes.

First, the core holding of Flint. that a tax on corporations for the benefits of being a corporation is by default an excise, is sound enough.

The question therefore is whether net income is a reasonable measure to use for the benefits of being a corporation.  Since any income that might be subject to the corporation tax could have avoided taxation by not using a corporate structure, unless the income in question was increased by using a corporate structure, there would be every incentive to not use a corporation and thus avoid the tax.  The very fact that the tax is not incurred by the mere existence and use of the actual property generating the income is enough to not make it a direct tax under case law prior to Flint.

In short, Flint essentially holds that corporations are not property, but a means of holding property, and that while taxes on property (or the revenues thereof) constitute a direct tax, taxes on a means of holding property (or collecting the revenues thereof) do not.