Bad science, bad judgment

Dominador Awiten .

STEPHEN Jay Gould, honored by the US Library of Congress as a “Living Legend” for his enormous contributions to erudition and scholarship, postulated after a careful investigation that the United States Supreme Court rendered an unjust decision on the basis of a supposition that would later be considered as weakly evidenced.

His article is entitled “Carrie Buck’s Daughter,” (originally carried in 93 Natural History, July 1984, copyright American Museum of Natural History), and tells about the US Supreme Court’s bestowal of legitimacy to the project of sterilization carried out in Virginia.

Her mother was said to be an imbecile as was Carrie Buck. Her daughter (illegitimately conceived) also was evaluated as mentally defective. 

When the litigation reached the US Supreme Court on a writ of error (in 1927), the decision was premised on the factual supposition that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

It is unfortunate that the writer of the decision was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who was known for his advocacy for the freedom of human will. 

An admirer of Holmes would be aghast at what Holmes wrote: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Such uncharacteristic cruelty from the famously learned jurist who championed, as noted by Gould in his review, such great legal concepts and paradigms like judicial restraint and the rule of “clear and present danger.”  

The speculativeness of the ruling in Buck is uncharacteristic for the ponente of the case of Schenck v. United States (1919) who wrote: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” 

Holmes upheld the Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals’ judgment that Carrie Buck was subject to lawful sterilization to prevent her having offspring that would be socially inadequate.

But, on a reexamination of the evidence, Gould contended that the facts were not as supposed to be. Carrie Buck was not in reality demented, nor was her daughter Vivian who, before her death at the tender age of eight, was considered mentally deficient at the age of seven months by mere comparison with another child whose parents were of socio-economic standing much privileged than her mother.

Gould cited one reexaminer, legal historian Paul Lombardo of the Georgia State University.

For Dr. Lombardo, the Buck case should be dumped in “the legal hall of shame.” He argued that Holmes’ ponencia (of an 8 to 1 judgement) was “callous” and based on “deceit and betrayal.”

For Dr. Lombardo’s reexamination would yield to the conclusion that the prosecution for Carrie Buck to undergo sterilization was motivated more by concealment of her being raped and consequent unconsented pregnancy.  It was likened to the victim being blamed for her being offended.

It turned out that Justice Holmes (and then Chief Justice William Howard Taft who assigned the writing of the decision to Holmes) had affinity with certain so-called public health experts who espoused eugenics as a tool to improve the human gene pool while doing away with the (supposedly) defective in society.

Here is a highly egregious epitome of “bad science” used to foist an unjust judgement.    In the words of Michael Crichton, science that is “politicized.”

The presumption that a child is defective because their parents and grandparents are defective is non-sequitur.  There is in this presumption a genetic fallacy that is also a slippery slope.

The sad thing is that Buck v. Bell is still case law — it has not been reversed, even at the cost of several thousands of sterilization conducted and publicly accepted in the United States.