Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing has concluded and the Senate is expected to confirm his nomination, albeit by a very narrow margin. Compared to other recent hearings, Brown’s was somewhat muted. However, he faced some comic questions: a senator asked him to rate the strength of his faith; another asked if babies are racist; another asked her to define ‘woman’.
The questions underscored the current nature of Senate confirmation hearings. They have become theaters of partisan warfare, as senators use the guise of a Supreme Court hearing to further political agendas.
Still, some questions may have raised questions about the character of Ketanji Brown, questions that we have taken the liberty of answering.
Brown has vowed to remain impartial, despite strong suggestions that he will join the liberal side of the Supreme Court.
“I have been a judge for almost a decade and I take my responsibility to be independent very seriously,” Ketanji said on the opening day of his confirmation hearing. “I decide cases from a neutral position.”
Some senators suggested that Jackson is an “activist judge,” a judge who dictates her preferences in her decisions. Ketanji stated that she is fully aware of her judicial limits and has a methodology that prevents her from overstepping. “I’m trying in all cases to stay in my lane,” she said.
Politicians only complain about judicial activism when it interferes with their political ideologies. Brown reiterated that he would remain impartial, although, despite not saying it out loud, Democrats hope he will be activist enough to support his agenda.
Ketanji Brown is expected to join the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. She replaces a liberal justice, so her confirmation won’t affect the court’s conservative 6-3 record.
However, as Ketanji Brown admitted, dissenting decisions sometimes form the basis of law in the future; a dissenting decision may not affect the court’s decision, but may prove significant later. Brown gave the example of Judge Harlan’s dissent in Plessy vs. Ferguson:
“All the other judges agreed with the ‘separate but equal’ proposition, and he said ‘no’ in disagreement. And his dissent, generations later, became … the template for Justice Marshall to make the arguments that led to Brown v. Board. [of Education of Topeka].”
Despite having a conservative bias, the Supreme Court often decides cases unanimously: almost half of the cases in the last decade received unanimous decisions. Therefore, Jackson will not always be on the dissenting side.
Ketanji has sentenced child offenders in line with other federal judges
In his opening statement, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri read seven cases heard by Brown, which demonstrated inconsistencies between Ketanji’s sentences and existing sentencing guidelines.
“What concerns me, and I have been very candid about it, is that Judge Jackson handed down a lenient sentence that did not meet the recommended guidelines,” Hawley said. Hawley suggested that Ketanji was “soft on crime” and particularly lenient with child sex offenders.
“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,” Ketanji said. He expressed his disdain for sex offenders, explaining that his sentencing was in conflict with congressional sentencing guidelines because the guidelines did not change with the evolving nature of the crimes.
“As the law currently stands, the way that Congress has directed the sentencing commission appears to be inconsistent with how these crimes are committed, and therefore there is extreme disparity,” Jackson said.
Senator Hawley stated that during her time as a member of the United States Sentencing Commission, Ketanji advocated for the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for child pornography. In fact, the bipartisan commission recommended to Congress that the existing guidelines were too harsh for some crimes and too lenient for others.
“We work by consensus, and that is the tradition of the sentencing commission,” said Judge William H. Pryor, a committee member along with Brown. The New York Times. “Virtually all of our votes were unanimous and based on data.”
Hawley responded to a Washington Post fact check on the matter by saying, “As for the other commissioners who supported this bad recommendation, they probably shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court either.”
Senator Marsha Blackburn highlighted Jackson’s penchant for sentencing below federal schemes. However, this is not uncommon among federal judges, as Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman noted on her blog.
Berman asserted that federal judges rarely follow federal sentencing guidelines for child sexual images, which “are widely recognized as dysfunctional and unduly harsh.” “If we correctly contextualize Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in federal child pornography cases, it will look pretty conventional,” she added.
Ketanji Brown Did Not Choose to Represent Detainees at Guantanamo Bay
If confirmed, Ketanji Brown will be the first former public defender to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. Being a public defender is part of the legal profession and therefore has no bearing on Ketanji’s performance as a judge.
However, it just so happens that she represented Guantanamo Bay detainees during her time as a public defender. Some lawmakers expressed concern that Brown was providing “free legal services to help remove terrorists” from the facility.
John Cornyn of Texas asked why Jackson named former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former President George W. Bush “war criminals.” “Why would you do something like that? It seems so out of character,” John said.
Jackson said he needed to read the document carefully before commenting on the matter, using a dodge tactic popularized by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and expertly exploited by Justice Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearing.
“Judge Jackson took very few strong positions on anything remotely controversial,” said Paul M. Collins Jr., a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts. The New York Times. “In fact, it appears that she closely studied how Judge Barrett handled the committee and repeatedly referred to Barrett’s responses when she dodged questions from the senators.”
Ketanji Brown reiterated that public defenders do not get to choose who they represent. “Federal public defenders cannot choose their clients” she said. Brown described legal representation, even for the most heinous criminals, as a “fundamental constitutional value.”
Brown said he never met the four men he was assigned to represent. The men were never tried: the charges were dropped and they were released.
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn