08/14/2022
Ketanji Brown Jackson's Soft Spot for Drug Dealers, Pedophiles and Terrorists
When she was getting her law degree at Harvard, Jackson wrote a brief in the Harvard Law Review arguing that the judicial system was unfair to people who s*xually prey on children, because it sentences them to monitoring and treatment after prison, which she viewed as additional "punishment" masquerading as prevention. Although the Supreme Court has upheld such requirements, she complained that "community notification subjects ex-convicts to stigmatization and ostracism, and puts them at the mercy of a public that is outraged by s*x crimes." She further worried that ordering offenders to enter mental health facilities deprives them of their "fundamental right to freedom," and she suggested that its real purpose is satisfying "the societal interest in locking s*x offenders up and throwing away the key."
Her apparent empathy for such offenders has carried over into her years on the sentencing commission and federal bench.
On the commission, Jackson took a special interest in federal sentencing guidelines for child po*******hy, which makes up less than 2% of cases on the federal docket. She stated in hearings that she did not "necessarily" view child po*******hy offenders as pedophiles, and suggested that federal sentencing guidelines mandating they be locked up for a minimum of five years "may be excessively severe" — a view that once again was seemingly at odds with the Obama Justice Department, which advised the commission to "ensure that the sentences for child exploitation offenses adequately reflect the seriousness of the crimes and the offenders."
Jackson’s own views manifested in a major 2012 commission report to Congress, "Federal Child Po*******hy Offenses," which found that current federal sentencing guidelines — including aggravating factors based on the volume of illegal p**n in a defendant’s possession — were "outdated" thanks to easier access to such p**n on the Internet and were therefore "too severe" for today's defendants busted for collecting child p**n online, even when it includes videos of child r**e. The report specifically recommended lighter sentences for such criminals.
As a result of the proposed new guidelines, critics say many judges across the country have found ways to avoid giving felons who receive or solicit child p**n the mandatory minimum prison sentence. In addition, the report that Jackson spearheaded also questioned the "collateral issues" of federal courts ordering child p**nographers to register as s*x offenders and commit to treatment, echoing the concerns she raised in her 1996 Harvard Law Review paper.
Later, as a D.C. judge, Jackson under-sentenced defendants in every single child p**n case in which she had discretion to mete out punishment, court records show, even though some were caught with thousands of illegal images and videos of minors and one was busted with images of naked toddlers tortured by adults in sadomasochistic acts. She not only departed from federal sentencing guidelines, but in many cases eschewed the recommendations of prosecutors and sometimes even probation departments, leaning instead in favor of the lighter punishments suggested by the child p**n offenders and their lawyers, many of whom worked in the same federal public defender office where she once worked. In some cases, court filings show she cited U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics gathered during her tenure there to back her rulings from the bench.
MORE TO COME!!!
