Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record of sentencing child pornography case offenders to below the minimum in federal sentencing guidelines looks like something that even Joe Biden wouldn’t have been stupid enough to ignore before nominating her to the Supreme Court, if he knew about it, so the obvious question becomes: who in the Administration failed to discover this during the vetting process?
That, at least, was what I thought when I first heard about this pattern of sentencing. Then I read this article, and it isn’t pretty:
Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson open this week amid a flurry of misleading allegations by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley that the nominee has a “long record” of letting child porn offenders “off the hook” during sentencing.“In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley tweeted Thursday, highlighting nine cases from her time as a federal District Court judge.
How, I have to ask, are Senator Hawley’s “allegations” that Judge Jackson “has a ‘long record’ of letting child porn offenders ‘off the hook’ during sentencing” “misleading”? Did she, or didn’t she impose more lenient sentences on convicted child porn offenders?
While court records show that Jackson did impose lighter sentences than federal guidelines suggested, Hawley’s insinuation neglects critical context, including the fact that the senator himself has voted to confirm at least three federal judges who also engaged in the same practice.
Oh, so she did do what the distinguished gentleman from Missouri said that she did.
Federal appeals court Judges Joseph Bianco of the Second Circuit and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit, both Trump appointees, had each previously sentenced defendants convicted of possessing child pornography to prison terms well below federal guidelines at the time they were confirmed with Hawley’s support, an ABC review of court records found.
Asked about the votes Monday by ABC News, Sen. Hawley made clear he has never supported a high court nominee with a similar record in child porn sentencing cases. “Not for this court I haven’t, not for the U.S. Supreme Court,” Hawley told ABC’s Rachel Scott when asked whether his criticism of Judge Jackson presented a double standard.
Hawley said he would not consider a below-guidelines child porn sentence “acceptable” from a nominee and suggested that he was not aware of the times Judges Bianco and Brasher and a third judge, Carl Nichols of the D.C. District Court, had rendered such judgments.
Apparently ‘what aboutism’ is the defense being used to support Judge Jackson on this. If Senator Hawley knew about such in the record of previous nominees for whom he voted, then shame on him, but it is obvious that nominees for lower courts don’t receive the same type of delving into their records that Supreme Court nominees do.
Skipping down a few paragraphs, we come to this:
“If and when we properly contextualize Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in federal child porn cases, it looks pretty mainstream,” wrote Doug Berman, a leading expert on sentencing law and policy at The Ohio State University School of Law.
“Federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the [child porn] guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases,” Berman noted on his blog, and “when deciding to go below the [child porn] guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum.”
Professor Berman continued to note that below-range sentences are frequently requested by prosecutors, including some on the cases before Judge Jackson, and that many judges determine that the guidelines are “unduly harsh,” especially when it comes to “first-time offenders.”
Ten years, twenty years, is not too harsh a sentence for these offenses; such sentences are, in fact, too lenient. Judges should have multiple count conviction sentences run consecutively, not concurrently.
Of course, read the wording here: when prosecutors recommend specific sentences, it almost always means that this is part of a plea bargain arrangement. In child pornography cases, either the defendant was caught to the child porn, or he wasn’t. Witnesses aren’t required, save for procedural and chain-of-custody, simply the evidence. If the evidence is solid, have the defendant either plead to the maximum, or go to trial. We have previously noted how, locally, Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has allowed lenient plea bargain arrangements even in murder cases, and while that’s too small a sample, the truth is that it happens everywhere in this country.
Prosecutors love plea bargains! Guaranteed convictions make them look good, and reduce the amount of work they have to do, but we need to hold prosecutors, judges, and probation and parole officials accountable, accountable for the proper punishment of criminals and for the safety of the public.
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I don’t have any problem with a judge issuing a lighter sentence, when it is because of some piece of mitigation that validates the judge’s decision. I do have a problem, though, when a judge issues a lighter sentence because of his or her ideological preference. Ideology has no place on any bench, saloon or other place where a judge is required to make a decision about one’s fate. The only place where ideology has value is between two people arguing over something, where ideology can be freely exchanged and possibly changed by one or the other. This judge is an ideologue, period. She had no good reason to be appointed the first time, unless race is a reason, and it isn’t.
Since she is supposedly a woman who can’t answer a simple question about what a woman is, she should find that saloon and dispense justice in the form of drinks, because that’s all she is good for. I hear there are openings in the field of biology. Maybe she should go back to school to learn about the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees.
Remember that she let a murderer out of jail, due to Covid. Some judge!
Good article, Dana.
I don’t have any problem with a judge issuing a lighter sentence, when it is because of some piece of mitigation that validates the judge’s decision. I do have a problem, though, when a judge issues a lighter sentence because of his or her ideological preference. Ideology has no place on any bench, saloon or other place where a judge is required to make a decision about one’s fate. The only place where ideology has value is between two people arguing over something, where ideology can be freely exchanged and possibly changed by one or the other. This judge is an ideologue, period. She had no good reason to be appointed the first time, unless race is a reason, and it isn’t.
Since she is supposedly a woman who can’t answer a simple question about what a woman is, she should find that saloon and dispense justice in the form of drinks, because that’s all she is good for. I hear there are openings in the field of biology. Maybe she should go back to school to learn about the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees.
Remember that she let a murderer out of jail, due to Covid. Some judge!
Good article, Dana.