President Joe Biden's selection for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has emphatically dismissed claims made by Republicans that she deliberately granted child sex offenders excessive leniency during sentencing.
“As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth,” Jackson said in Senate testimony Tuesday. “I understand how significant, how damaging, how horrible this crime is,” she added.
Jackson promised that she always put the harm done to victims of child sex offenders at the forefront of her sentencing decisions. “I tell [offenders] about the adults who are former child sex abuse victims [who] tell me that they will never have a normal adult relationship because of this abuse. I tell them about the ones who say ‘I went into prostitution, I fell into drugs because I was trying to suppress the hurt that was done to me as an infant.’”
Jackson’s testimony follows claims by Republican senator Josh Hawley that the judge showed an “alarming pattern” of leniency towards child sex offenders. Last week, Hawley said that he noticed “an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children".
Jackson, Hawley alleged, “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker. She’s been advocating [leniency] since law school. This goes beyond ‘soft on crime’. I’m concerned that this is a record that endangers our children.”
Digging into her record, the senator pointed to her questioning of laws to force convicts to register as sex offenders, and an effort on Jackson’s part to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for child porn.
“On the federal bench, Judge Jackson put her troubling views into action. In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favour of child porn offenders,” Hawley alleged, going on to list seven cases which he said proved his point.
Hawley and others, including senior Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, have called on the Sentencing Commission to release complete records related to Jackson’s role. In a television interview on Sunday, Grassley alleged that this was being withheld because “someone somewhere doesn’t want us to see that information”.
The White House dismissed concerns raised by Hawley and other Republicans, with Biden press secretary Jen Psaki accusing the GOP of a “last-ditch, eve-of-hearing desperation attack on her record”. Another White House spokesman charged the senator with spreading a “desperate conspiracy theory [which] has been conclusively debunked by several fact checks in the press.”
Hawley responded by accusing the media of “regurgitating White House talking points”.
Republicans’ concerns about Jackson’s rulings follow separate consternation over her record of representing two people detained at Guantanamo Bay, the infamous US prison known for jailing and torturing suspected “enemy combatants” without trial.
A Monmouth poll released on Monday found that 55 percent of Americans believe Jackson should be confirmed to the Supreme Court, 21 percent say she should not be confirmed, and 24 percent holding no opinion. As to whether she is qualified for the job, 47 percent said they believe that she is “very qualified” or “somewhat qualified,” 9 percent say she is not qualified and 43 percent admit they have not heard enough about her to assess her qualifications.
Biden nominated Jackson in February after Justice Stephen Breyer announced plans to retire. At present she serves as a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.