Kudos to the US Supreme Court for its forthright stand this week for the principle of judicial restraint.
Convicted rapist William Osborne had sued Alaska prosecutors for a DNA test he said might clear him of the crime.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, on the merits: Forensic DNA advances have led to scores of exonerations for wrongly convicted inmates, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his majority opinion.
But Roberts and four other justices nonetheless rejected Osborne’s claim.
It was the right call.
That’s because Osborne wasn’t just seeking a second chance; indeed, he has confessed to the crime.
He was asserting a fundamental constitutional right for duly convicted inmates to have the evidence against them tested and re-tested — all the while in search of some glitch in the system.
As Roberts pointed out, fully 46 states — including New York — already allow for at least some post-conviction DNA tests.
But creating a new right would potentially wreak havoc on the commonsense safeguards states have set up to make sure the process isn’t abused.
Looks like the representatives of the people have the matter firmly in hand.
The court was wise not to interfere.