Bad. To put it simply.
There’s no good way to spin Ketanji Brown Jackson handing out light sentences to child porn offenders. Including a 3 month sentence and an apology.
“You were only going to give him three months because you had judged that he wasn’t a pedophile and then you said — and this is something I really need your help understanding — then you apologized to him,” Hawley said, reading from the record of the case. “I can’t quite figure this out. You said to him, ‘This is truly a difficult situation. I appreciate that your family is in the audience. I feel so sorry for them and for you and for the anguish this has caused all of you.'”
“I’m just trying to figure out, judge, here: Is he the victim here or are the victims the victims?” he said, noting the lack of a victim impact statement in the record.
Jackson responded that while she didn’t have the entire record in front of her, she considered the case to be “unusual.”
She said that defense counsel was arguing for probation because the defendant has just graduated from high school and “had gotten into this in a way that I thought was inconsistent with some of the other cases I had seen.”
It’s not much of a comeback.
The media and some GOPers tried to warn against raising questions about Jackson’s child porn sentences in favor of focusing on philosophical questions. And while I agree that the philosophical questions are more important, they’re not what people care about or are the most effective tools in the toolbox.
And Jackson really had no answers except to blame Congress, and keep claiming that as a mother she couldn’t possibly have done what she did.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) produced a chart that noted in several cases, Jackson had pronounced sentences that were a 14 percent to 64 percent reduction from what the prosecutor had requested.
“[In] United States vs. Chazin, the prosecutor asked for 78 to 97 months. You imposed 28 months. Twenty-eight months is a 64 percent reduction. In United States vs. Cooper, the prosecutor asked for 72 months, you imposed 60 months,” Cruz listed. “That was a 17 percent reduction. In United States vs. Downs, the prosecutor asked for 70 months, you imposed 60 – that was a 14 percent reduction. United States vs. Hawkins, the prosecutor asked for 24 months, you imposed three months – that was an 80 percent reduction. In United States vs. Savage, the prosecutor asked for 49 months, you imposed 37 – that was a 24 percent reduction. In the United States vs. Stewart, the prosecutor asked for 97 months, you imposed 57 – that was a 40 percent reduction.”
There’s a reason that the media was frantically trying to head off this line of attack before it happened. We’ve now seen it in action.
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