Johnson didn’t mind angering colleagues, whether from the Judicial Council or on the bench. “She pisses them off quite often,” Alanah Odoms, head of the ACLU of Louisiana, said recently. By the late 1990s, taking a humane position on the inequities of the criminal legal system put Johnson decidedly out of step with Louisiana. Williams said the disproportionately negative effect on Black people in the state “kept her up at night.”
Johnson wasn’t a traditional liberal (her jurisprudence was arguably to the right of, say, Miriam Waltzer’s), but her opinions could seem progressive. This is particularly true on a court that had only become more conservative. Morial said that, historically, Louisiana’s Supreme Court was progressive for a Southern state, and remained so at least through the 1970s and 1980s. But then the state at large went from purple to red, and the court went with it. That was “a frustration to Justice Johnson.”
Black people in Louisiana had few allies on the court. Consider the case of Dobie Gillis Williams, convicted of murder in 1984 and sentenced to die. His lawyers argued that, in the event of a stay, Williams deserved a new execution date. The Supreme Court, with the exception of Johnson, disagreed, and Williams—famously championed by Sister Helen Prejean—was executed by lethal injection in 1999. That December, Johnson was, again, the lone dissenter when the court restored the life sentence of James Tyrone Randall, convicted of simple robbery, of a bicycle, and previously for possession of stolen goods; the sentence, applied under the habitual offender laws, had been vacated by an appeals court. Then, in 2001, Johnson was alone in arguing that Emmett Dion Taylor, a Black man accused of murdering an elderly pharmacist, should be granted an appeal. His lawyers believed that prosecutors intentionally kept Black people off the jury.
That same year, in a widely publicized case, the Supreme Court upheld Timothy Jackson’s sentence of life without the possibility of parole for shoplifting a $160 jacket. Jackson, a New Orleanian with a sixth-grade education, struggled with substance use disorder. Instead of giving him the standard two-year sentence, the court—taking into account a conviction in juvenile court and two car burglaries—decided he should spend the rest of his life incarcerated. After Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decreased the sentence, the Supreme Court majority ruled, as the ACLU put it, “that judges may not depart from life sentences mandated by the habitual offender law except in rare instances.” Johnson wrote, “This sentence is constitutionally excessive in that it is grossly out of proportion to the seriousness of the offense.”