Hawaii already told the Supreme Court its gun rulings don't apply there.
A different Hawaii judge just used a rape conviction appeal to go further than that.
Now a state justice used a sex crime appeal to declare Hawaii done following federal law entirely.
Hawaii Supreme Court Frees Convicted Rapist While Justice Attacks Federal Law From the Bench
Daniel Granillo kidnapped a woman from a Maui parking lot in 1989, held a knife to her throat, drove her to a breakwater, and sexually assaulted her.
She escaped by jumping from his moving car.
A jury convicted Granillo in 1990 on kidnapping and two counts of first-degree sexual assault.
He received 40 years.
Decades later, the Department of Justice notified Hawaii prosecutors that FBI hair and fiber analysis used at trial had overstated what the science could actually prove.
Granillo filed a post-conviction petition.
That is where Hawaii Associate Justice Todd Eddins saw his opening.
Rather than issue a narrow ruling on the evidentiary question before him, Eddins turned the case into something else entirely – a 91-page left-wing political treatise against the Supreme Court of the United States.
Todd Eddins Called the Supreme Court Racist Inside an Official Court Opinion
Eddins declared that Hawaii interprets its constitution "independently, untethered from the Supreme Court's analysis of the United States Constitution."
He described Supreme Court rulings as "white noise."
Then he wrote this, in an official court opinion: "The Roberts Court sees only white."
On the next page: "That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design."
He accused the justices of "looking at naked racism and seeing none of it."
Eddins attacked the Court's campaign finance rulings, writing that "billionaires spend to be repaid" and "everyone else just votes” while accusing the Supreme Court of having "cratered democracy itself."
The opinion ran 91 pages – and this was a case about hair and fiber analysis from a 1989 criminal trial.
Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, didn’t hold back.
"It is an appalling departure from judicial restraint and decorum," Turley told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "Lines such as 'The Roberts Court sees only white' would make an MS NOW commentator blush. This is nothing more than an unserious screed rather than a reasoned opinion."
Hawaii Has Been Defying the Supreme Court Since the Second Amendment Gun Ruling
Eddins has been running this play for years.
In 2024, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled against Second Amendment rights by invoking the "spirit of Aloha" and openly defying the Supreme Court's landmark Bruen decision.
SCOTUS struck back this year, ruling in Wolford v. Lopez that Hawaii's gun carry restrictions violated the Second Amendment.
Eddins used the Granillo opinion to attack that ruling too – accusing the Supreme Court of making the country "more dangerous" with gun rights jurisprudence "unmoored from text or history."
A state court justice appointed by a Democrat governor, declaring himself free to disregard the highest court in the land.
What Eddins is doing has a name: nullification.
State Nullification of Federal Law Is the New Left-Wing Strategy and Hawaii Is the Test Case
The Left has a new strategy for dismantling constitutional order, and it doesn't require winning elections or passing laws.
The blueprint is simple: install activist judges in blue states, let them declare federal precedent optional, dress the defiance in racial grievance language, and protect the whole operation with lifetime appointments nobody can touch.
Hawaii is where that blueprint is being stress-tested.
If a state court can look at a Supreme Court ruling on voting rights, campaign finance, the Second Amendment, and presidential immunity – and call all of it "white noise" – then federal law means whatever blue-state judges decide it means on any given day.
Granillo gets a new trial.
His victim gets to relive it.
And Justice Eddins gets to call the Supreme Court racist in an official legal document – with no accountability, no consequences, and a lifetime appointment shielding him from both.
Sources:
- Jonathan Turley, quoted in Mary Margaret Olohan, "Hawaii's Top Court Unleashes 'Unserious Screed' Against Conservative-Majority Supreme Court," Daily Caller News Foundation, July 17, 2026.
- Granillo v. State of Hawaii, SCWC-22-0000740, Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi, July 15, 2026.
- Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046, United States Supreme Court, June 25, 2026.
- State of Hawaiʻi v. Wilson, Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi, February 7, 2024.
