by Ed Whelan | National Review
1972—The judicial takeover of school funding in New Jersey commences as state trial judge Theodore Botter rules (in Robinson v. Cahill) that New Jersey’s funding system, which relies heavily on local property taxes, violates the state constitutional provision, dating from 1875, that declares that the legislature “shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools” and also violates the equal-protection guarantees that are supposedly implicit in the state constitution and that are in the federal Constitution.
1989—Call it the Case of the Surprised Burglar. Two months after breaking up with his girlfriend, Timothy C. Hudson, armed with a knife, broke into her home during the night. The former girlfriend, having received threats from him, was spending the night elsewhere. But her roommate was at home. When she began screaming at him to leave, Hudson stabbed her to death, put her body in the trunk of her car, and dumped her in a drainage ditch in a tomato field. Hudson was convicted and sentenced to death.
In her dissent from the Florida supreme court’s affirmance of the death sentence (in Hudson v. State), Rosemary Barkett concludes that the death penalty was disproportionate to the offense—because Hudson “was apparently surprised by the victim during [his] burglarizing of [her] home.”
