Alito leaving SCOTUS 'out on a limb' with 'puzzling' judicial approach: legal experts

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story attributed a quote by Neil Siegel to Sherif Girgis. The article has been updated.

During his 18 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito has been known as a tough-on-crime jurist.

But NBC News legal reporter Lawrence Hurley, in an article published on May 12, reports that some legal experts believe that Alito is expressing more sympathy for criminal defendants if the person is former President Donald Trump or Trump supporters facing January 6, 2021-releated charges.

"Alito, appointed in 2006 by Republican President George W. Bush, has a reputation for being the justice on the Court most hostile to criminal defendants," Hurley explains. "Earlier in his career, he was a U.S. attorney in New Jersey and held several other positions in the Justice Department. He sides with defendants less frequently than any of his eight colleagues, according to numbers crunched by Lee Epstein, a political scientist at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law."

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Hurley continues, "But in several recent oral arguments in some of the most contentious cases currently before the Court, Alito has notably raised questions about the Justice Department's decisions to prosecute certain cases, expressed sympathy for Trump's argument that former presidents should be immune from prosecution, and aired concerns about gun owners being charged."

Neil Siegel, a law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, believes that Alito has some major contradictions where criminal justice is concerned.

Siegel told NBC News, "It's really quite puzzling that the most pro-government, anti-criminal-defendant justice is the one who, when it comes to President Trump being a criminal defendant, is willing to slander the career attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice."

In a recent article, Yale University law professor Kate Stith wrote that Alito is showing an "aversion to reasoning that will leave the Supreme Court.... out on a limb, in a place that threatens to undo social understanding and order."

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Sherif Girgis, a former Alito clerk who now teaches at Notre Dame Law School, believes that Alito's approach to criminal justice "raises extremely unusual constitutional questions."

Siegel similarly describes Alito as "the most MAGA Republican justice," adding, "and that is a horrible, horrible thing to say about any jurist."

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Read Lawrence Hurley's full NBC News article at this link.