The Hypocrisy of Chief Justice John W. Kittredge: When “Strict Constructionism” Becomes Constitutional Amnesia

I. The Disguised Law: A Ban on Accountability, Labeled “Administration”

In August 2024, John W. Kittredge ascended to the office of Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, presented to the public as a strict constructionist—a guardian of the Constitution who would interpret the law as written and refuse to legislate from the bench. Roughly four months later, he signed an “administrative order” that functions as law and directly infringes the First and Fourth Amendments—a blatant act of hypocrisy that dresses censorship and warrantless seizure in the robes of “procedure.”

On December 19, 2024, the Supreme Court of South Carolina issued Administrative Order No. 2024-12-19-01, titled “Re: Electronic Devices in Courthouses.” The order bans the use of “electronic devices” at any clerk’s-office counter or window in every courthouse in the state. The category is sweeping: cell phones, smart watches, laptops, tablets, cameras, even e-readers—in short, every modern tool by which citizens access information, verify filings, and document government conduct.
Under this order, anyone using such a device at a clerk’s window is subject to confiscation of the device, with return at the discretion of courthouse staff. In practice: use your phone while petitioning your government, and the state can take your property.
The framing is calculated. Rather than openly banning recording at clerk’s windows—the precise locus where the public seeks redress—the Court bans devices themselves and then insists it is not regulating speech or petition at all. This is the point: write a law, call it an administrative order, and pretend it’s not a First Amendment infringement because it forbids “devices,” not “recording.” The purpose is unmistakable—to prevent recording at the windows so courts cannot be held accountable.

II. The December 2024 Order: The Full Scope of the Ban

The December order expands and reaffirms a March 2023 directive. It applies to every courthouse statewide, at the public-facing counters where citizens file pleadings, pay fees, request public records, and seek redress. The prohibition covers the mundane and necessary: checking the time on a digital watch, retrieving a case number from a phone, confirming a filing receipt in an email, displaying a document, or verifying a clerk’s statement. The penalty—summary confiscation—turns routine, peaceful conduct into grounds for state seizure.

To the casual observer, this might look like trivial decorum. To anyone who takes the Constitution seriously—as Chief Justice Kittredge claims to—it is indefensible.

III. A Chief Justice Who Promised Constitutional Fidelity—Then Legislated by Decree

When John W. Kittredge was sworn in as Chief Justice in August 2024, he was heralded as a “strict constructionist”—a jurist bound to the text of the Constitution and committed to the limited power of the judiciary. In interviews and public addresses, Kittredge invoked the “rule of law as written” and warned judges never to legislate from the bench. He styled himself as the antidote to judicial activism—a man whose fidelity to constitutional text would preserve the people’s liberties: speech, petition, privacy, and due process.

Yet scarcely four months into his tenure, the same Chief Justice did exactly what he condemned. In December 2024, he signed an Administrative Order that redefines citizens’ constitutional rights by judicial decree. The order—a blanket ban on the use of electronic devices in public courthouse spaces—is not administrative housekeeping; it is the regulation of the public in a public forum. That is, by definition, a law.

The South Carolina Supreme Court’s Administrative Order functions as legislation in every practical and constitutional sense. It creates a new rule of general applicability, imposes penalties, and authorizes government seizure of private property. This is not “administration”; it is lawmaking—precisely the kind of judicial conduct Kittredge claimed to oppose.

The irony could not be sharper. Had the General Assembly enacted a statute authorizing warrantless confiscation of phones and forbidding citizens from using digital tools at public counters, Chief Justice Kittredge himself would have denounced it as an unconstitutional infringement on both the First and Fourth Amendments. But because it was the judiciary that issued this command under the pretense of “administration,” he now calls it procedure.

The hypocrisy is not superficial—it is structural and deliberate. Kittredge has legislated from the bench while claiming to be the man who never would, wielding judicial authority to create new restrictions on the public rather than interpret existing law. The purpose of this so-called administrative order is not to preserve decorum but to prevent citizens from documenting their own First Amendment–protected speech and petitioning activity, thereby shielding the judiciary and its staff from accountability. In doing so, Kittredge has converted judicial power into legislative power and erased the very constitutional boundaries he swore to defend.

IV. A Textbook Violation of the First Amendment

The First Amendment forbids government from abridging the freedom of speech or the right of the people to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Both guarantees are implicated—squarely and deeply.

1. Overbreadth

The order bans any “use” of an electronic device at the clerk’s window: checking a watch, pulling up a case number, displaying a filing receipt, verifying an email. Enforced literally, the rule criminalizes ordinary, peaceful conduct that enables speech and petition. Enforced selectively—against people who appear to be recording but not against those checking a watch—it invites arbitrary power and viewpoint discrimination.

A genuine strict constructionist should recognize that the rule is overbroad on its face: it sweeps far beyond any legitimate aim like privacy or decorum. Courts have repeatedly struck down blanket prohibitions of this sort as unconstitutional.

2. The Right to Petition

The clerk’s window is the physical point at which citizens access the courts. It is the front door to petition: filing, fees, records, redress. By banning devices at that very interface, the order burdens petitioning rights, especially for self-represented litigants who depend on phones to show documents, track case numbers, communicate, and document official conduct. The First Amendment was designed to restrain exactly this kind of bureaucratic silencing.

V. The Fourth Amendment and the Unreasonable Seizure of Property

Equally alarming is the order’s authorization to confiscate electronic devices without a warrant, probable cause, or individualized suspicion—a summary seizure carried out entirely at the discretion of courthouse staff. U.S. law is unequivocal: even a temporary deprivation of property constitutes a “seizure” requiring both reasonableness and due process. Yet under this order, due process is nowhere to be found. A clerk may, on personal whim, confiscate your smartwatch for checking the time, or take your phone for viewing a document or taking a photograph—all without notice, hearing, or legal justification.

A courthouse is not a constitutional vacuum, and a citizen’s phone is the modern repository of one’s papers, effects, and communications. To take someone’s phone under the excuse of “administration” is to bring back the same kind of unchecked government searches—the general warrants—that the Fourth Amendment was written to outlaw. Under Chief Justice Kittredge’s signature, the South Carolina judiciary has effectively authorized a modern-day general warrant in miniature, turning the people’s courthouse into a zone where constitutional protections are suspended by decree.

VI. Administrative Orders Are Not Above the Constitution

Supporters will say courthouses are non-public fora where speech may be limited for safety and decorum. True—but only up to a point. Even in non-public spaces, restrictions must be reasonable and viewpoint-neutral. A ban that targets devices rather than disruptive behavior is neither.

Courthouse decorum can be preserved through existing contempt powers and narrowly drawn rules against photographing third-party confidential information. What this order does instead is regulate possession and use themselves, regardless of intent or effect—a categorical restraint foreign to the First Amendment’s history and the Fourth Amendment’s text. Administrative convenience does not confer constitutional immunity. The Supreme Court of South Carolina is not a law unto itself.

VII. A Double Standard in Enforcement

The order offends equal enforcement in practice. Security personnel are unlikely to confiscate a deputy’s phone or a lawyer’s smartwatch. But a pro se litigant documenting misconduct at a window? That device will be taken. The text permits it, and human nature guarantees it. Selective enforcement transforms an administrative rule into a tool of censorship. Those most in need of transparency—citizens challenging misconduct—are the ones targeted by this administrative order to be silenced and punished.

VIII. Practical Consequences for Transparency

Beyond text and doctrine lies a practical truth: when citizens are forbidden from documenting or digitally verifying their court interactions, accountability collapses. Public confidence in courts depends on visibility. Transparency is not a privilege dispensed by the judiciary; it is the lifeblood of justice.

The device ban at clerk’s windows ensures that no citizen can easily record evidence of misconduct, mistreatment, delay, or bias. It shields bureaucratic behavior from scrutiny under the guise of orderliness. It transforms the courthouse from a house of record into a zone of silence. That is not justice administered; it is justice concealed.

IX. The Rhetoric Versus the Reality

Chief Justice Kittredge has built his reputation on professed reverence for the Constitution. He presents himself as a judge who interprets the law rather than inventing it, cautioning others never to replace the framers’ text with personal judgment. Yet this very order exposes the emptiness of that promise. Had the General Assembly enacted a statute granting state officials the power to seize citizens’ phones without warrants and block digital access at courthouse counters, Kittredge would have condemned it as a blatant constitutional violation. But when the judiciary itself imposes the same restrictions under the banner of “administration,” he treats it as routine procedure. The man who once swore to constrain power by text now expands it by definition, stretching the word administration wide enough to consume the First and Fourth Amendments he vowed to uphold.

X. Insufficient Notice and the Fiction of Posting

The order proclaims that its contents will be “posted on the courthouse door” as notice to the public. This ritualized posting undercuts its own legitimacy. Most citizens do not read multi-page legal directives taped to an entrance. Posting might serve ceremonial transparency, but it does not constitute actual notice in any meaningful sense.

An administrative order—unlike a statute—has no universal presumption of notice. Ignorance of the law may not excuse statutory violations, but an order is not a law. It binds only those who have been properly informed and who willfully disobey. To enforce a court order against a person who never received clear, individualized notice is to punish ignorance, not defiance.

True notice requires direct, understandable, contemporaneous communication with the conduct being regulated. Anything less converts “order” into entrapment.

XI. A Pattern of Institutional Control

The December 2024 order must be understood not as an isolated act, but as part of a broader pattern emerging within South Carolina’s judiciary. Across the state, administrative mechanisms have quietly replaced transparent rulemaking. Orders are now issued without public hearing, public comment, or legislative oversight, yet they bind every litigant as though enacted into law. The very branch sworn to interpret the law has instead begun to create it.

This blurring of powers would have appalled the framers—and any genuine constitutionalist. Under Chief Justice Kittredge, the line between judicial administration and substantive lawmaking has collapsed into convenience and self-preservation—a system designed not to serve the people, but to protect judges from accountability. This so-called “administrative order” operates as a law written from the bench, crafted to shield South Carolina’s courts from public scrutiny and to suppress First Amendment-protected speech—the very speech that empowers citizens to express grievances and inform the public of governmental misconduct.

XII. The Moral Dimension of Hypocrisy

This is not simply legal inconsistency; it is moral integrity at stake. When a chief justice invokes the Constitution to justify restraint in some contexts but ignores it when institutional control is at risk, he undermines the judiciary’s legitimacy.

Kittredge’s order lays bare an uncomfortable truth about South Carolina’s judiciary: that constitutional principles become negotiable when they are inconvenient, that liberty gives way to bureaucracy, and that the “rule of law” now means whatever the judiciary declares it to be. A genuine strict constructionist would have paused to ask a single, obvious question before signing: “Where, in the Constitution’s text, does a court find the power to impose prior restraint on citizens’ speech and to confiscate their property when they have broken no law?” There is no answer—because there is no such authority.

XIII. What True Constitutional Leadership Would Look Like

A chief justice faithful to the Constitution could have achieved every legitimate aim—privacy, decorum, security—without suppressing fundamental rights or relying on fictional notice. The problem has never been that people use phones or cameras in courthouses; it is how those devices are used. And in truth, there has never been a legitimate problem at all. It is doubtful that anyone has been filming or recording private third-party conversations at clerk’s windows. But even if such a concern existed, there are simple, lawful solutions that do not require the violation of the First or Fourth Amendments.

The only legitimate reason to limit recording in a courthouse would be to prevent the capture of genuinely confidential information—a narrow concern, easily defined and easily managed. Yet that is not what this order does. The point of this “law” is not to protect privacy, but to silence accountability. It exists because citizens have begun using their recording devices to expose misconduct and to hold the judiciary publicly answerable—an outcome the courts themselves find unacceptable.

This is why the administrative order refuses to stay in its lane. If it were truly limited to protecting third-party privacy, it would fail to serve its real purpose: to shield South Carolina’s courts from scrutiny, both in the legal process and in the public eye.

Outside that narrow, legitimate exception, every citizen has the right to record their own interactions with court officials performing public duties. These exchanges are part of the public record of government conduct, not private communications. Recording is accountability, and accountability is an act of petitioning the government—a core expression of the First Amendment, not a violation of it.

If the state truly seeks to balance privacy and liberty, it should begin with notice, not punishment. Anyone recording should first be clearly informed of any prohibition on capturing third-party information and given a real opportunity to comply. Only a direct and knowing refusal after explicit warning can constitute willful disobedience. To confiscate property or sanction citizens without such a warning is to convert administrative preference into unlawful decree—a practice that belongs not in a constitutional republic, but in an authoritarian system afraid of being watched.

A constitutional path forward:

1. Prohibit only the recording/photography of third-party confidential information, not documentation of one’s own filings or conversations with court staff.

2. Require explicit, real-time notice before any enforcement action—posting on a door is not notice.

3. Enforce only upon direct refusal after a clear warning; an order must be knowingly and willfully violated to be enforceable.

These measures would protect privacy while respecting liberty, keeping court authority within constitutional bounds. The December order chose control instead.

XIV. The Chief Justice’s Hypocrisy Made This Lawlessness Possible

Chief Justice John W. Kittredge calls himself a strict constructionist, a defender of constitutional text who would never legislate from the bench. Yet under his hand, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued an “administrative order” that operates as a law in disguise—criminalizing speech, authorizing warrantless seizures, and silencing citizens at the very windows where they petition their government. Kittredge’s hypocrisy is not theoretical—it has real victims. I am one of them.

In May and June 2024, I was sentenced twice for contempt—first to ten days, then to fifty—for allegedly violating the March 2023 version of this same “administrative order” that Kittredge later reaffirmed in December. My so-called crime? Recording openly and peacefully in a public courthouse lobby to protect myself and document misconduct for public scrutiny.

The Probate Judge of Oconee County, Danny Singleton, used this unconstitutional order as his weapon. His behavior was not judicial; it was personal. Singleton had a longstanding grudge against my wife and me. For me this started in October of 2023, after I delivered a notice of appeal to his court, he became angry and accused me of committing a crime in the courthouse lobby—simply because I told another citizen that he had the right to represent himself pro se, a fundamental constitutional right. Singleton falsely accused me of acting as a lawyer without a license. Had I recorded that exchange, I could have proven his lie.

That same court later targeted my wife. She needed records to perfect her own appeal and ordered them through the clerk’s office. The clerk promised the documents within ten days, then intentionally delayed delivery until after the appeal deadline, attempting to ensure the appeal would fail. When the court finally produced the records, the clerk demanded over $400 and threatened that my wife would be jailed for contempt if she did not pay.

I went to the courthouse myself, intending to pay the bill and voice my concerns publicly about what was happening. I recorded openly, in full view of staff—not secretly—because I had learned that truth in the Oconee County Probate Court vanishes when it isn’t recorded. I had no notice of any administrative order, no warning, no posting on the courthouse door as required by the order itself. No one told me to stop.

Days later, I returned to collect my summons to appear in court for contempt for the previous recording at the clerks window, and I recorded that interaction in the lobby away from the clerks window. I was arrested in the lobby and charged with “direct contempt of court.” The charge did not arise from open court, but from events in the lobby—outside the judge’s presence and beyond his jurisdiction. What followed was a charade of justice. I was denied counsel. Singleton acted as investigator, prosecutor, and victim, calling his own subordinates as witnesses, questioning them from the bench, and expressing his personal grievances in open court.

The first ten-day sentence was imposed on the spot when I returned to the courthouse to collect my summons. Soon after, a second sham hearing was convened, resulting in an additional fifty days in jail. Both contempt sentences were issued without any valid case number whatsoever—after the summons had been filed under my wife’s unrelated civil estate case, a matter that had absolutely nothing to do with me. This was not the rule of law; it was vindictive imprisonment, executed under color of judicial authority to punish dissent, not to administer justice.

When I appealed, Judge Lawton McIntosh of the Tenth Circuit Court reviewed the record and found nothing wrong. He affirmed every procedural violation, every denial of due process, every misuse of power. His ruling confirmed what is now the judicial culture of South Carolina: lawlessness is not punished when it is committed by judges—it is rewarded.

This lawlessness exists because Chief Justice John W. Kittredge, and others before him, have normalized it. His so-called administrative “order” did what no legislature would dare—it criminalized public accountability, turning the First Amendment into contraband. Kittredge has shown every judge in this state that constitutional limits don’t apply to them, that they may make law under the guise of procedure and call tyranny “administration.”

Kittredge’s order did not merely chill speech—it outlawed transparency. It transformed the simple acts of recording, petitioning, and public documentation into offenses of defiance. Worse still, it sent a clear signal to every judge in South Carolina that the Constitution is no longer a boundary but an obstacle—something to be sidestepped whenever accountability threatens the institution. When the state’s highest judge treats transparency as a threat and public record as rebellion, every courthouse in South Carolina becomes a place where truth itself is treated as contempt.

XV. The Measure of Integrity

John W. Kittredge rose to South Carolina’s highest judicial office promising fidelity to the written Constitution. Yet under his watch, the judiciary now confiscates citizens’ property without warrants, silences speech at public counters, and jails people for exercising their rights. That is not strict constructionism; it is constitutional amnesia masquerading as discipline.

The South Carolina Constitution begins with a declaration:

“All political power is vested in and derived from the people.”

But in Kittredge’s South Carolina, power flows upward—to the judges, to the clerks, to those who wield procedure as a weapon and call it law. The people are expected to be silent, unrecorded, and unseen.

I lived the consequences of that silence. I was jailed for recording peacefully in a public courthouse lobby—for doing exactly what the First Amendment protects. My wife was threatened, fined, and humiliated under the same abuse of power. And when I appealed, every court above has approved so far. The case in now peding in the South Carolina Court of Appeals.

That is the legacy of John W. Kittredge’s hypocrisy. When the Chief Justice of South Carolina treats the Constitution as conditional, when he writes law under the guise of procedure to shield judges from scrutiny, there is no safe place left for anyone caught in the judiciary’s grasp.

No administrative order—no matter how neatly printed on Supreme Court letterhead—can erase this truth:
The people have the right to observe, record, and document their own government.
And no judge, not even the Chief Justice of South Carolina, stands above that law.