Hawley continues to claim that SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is soft on crime
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The fourth and final day of confirmation hearings for President Biden's Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson took place Thursday.
The first Black, female nominee to the court has been the focus of intense questioning by Republican senators. Jackson has been accused by Republican senators of giving out lenient sentencing in Child Pornography cases.
During the historic confirmation hearing, Jackson was grilled for almost 22 hours by the Senate Judiciary Committee members, who claim that she is soft on crime.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley continues to claim that Jackson was too lenient in her sentencing in child pornography cases. "I just can not support somebody with that kind of record," Hawley said Thursday in an interview with ABC 17 News.
"I am questioning your discretion, your judgment," Hawley told Jackson during the hearing. Hawley and Jackson got into an intense back-and-forth over her decisions in certain cases. One such case that Hawley chose to focus on was the United States v. Hawking case, where Jackson sentenced the defendant to three months in prison.
"As a judge who is a mom and has been tasked with the responsibility of actually reviewing the evidence, the evidence that you would not describe in polite company, the evidence that you are pointing to, discussing, addressing in this context is evidence that I have seen in my role as a judge and it is heinous. It is egregious," Jackson said in response to Hawley.
Jackson went on to say that "All of the offenses are horrible, all of the offenses are egregious but the guidelines are being departed from even with respect to the government's recommendation."
Hawley said that over the course of the 20 hours spent in the hearing he walked through seven different cases with Jackson and went in-depth into her record. "The fact of the matter is this is someone who has given lenient sentences to child porn offenders over and over and over in every case she has had in 10 years on the bench with a child sex offender."
Hawley told ABC 17 News that she has gone below the sentencing guidelines, prosecutor recommendations and "in many cases (gave) a slap on the wrist."
In response to being asked about experts saying that her sentencing is on par with other federal judges, Hawley said "I'm not aware of a single federal judge in the country who one-hundred-percent of the time goes below the sentencing guidelines."
Lawrence Dessem, an expert in federal courts at the University of Missouri School of Law, said "the problem here is cherry-picking seven cases, and saying that those seven cases out of the hundreds of defendants that Judge Brown Jackson sentenced somehow constitutes a trend .It clearly doesn't."
Dessem continued to highlight the fact that "in every case the sentence was legal, and probably appropriate." Dessem said that only two cases of the seven were below what the U.S probation office recommendations.
Thursday wraps up the public hearings, and the next step in Jackson's confirmation process will begin. The committee is scheduled to vote on her nomination on April 4.
