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Hawley Slams SCOTUS Nominee’s Soft on Child Porn Rulings

Senator Josh Hawley, in what might be a preview of how he’ll go after Kentaji Brown Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, hit the judge over what he characterized as her record of going soft on those charged with child porn offenses, saying:

I’ve been researching the record of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, reading her opinions, articles, interviews & speeches. I’ve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children

Judge Jackson 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 for it since law school. This goes beyond “soft on crime.” I’m concerned that this a record that endangers our children

Later in the massive, 18-tweet thread, Hawley adds concrete actions that Jackson has taken to help get those child porn offenders off the hook, saying:

It gets worse. As a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Judge Jackson advocated for drastic change in how the law treats sex offenders by eliminating the existing mandatory minimum sentences for child porn

Judge Jackson has said that some people who possess child porn “are in this for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.” What community would that be? The community of child exploiters?

He adds in screenshots of other horrific parts of her record and cites a number of cases where she gave light sentences to child porn offenders, including a case where she gave a child porn offender who even abused a 9-year-old about half the sentence he should have gotten, a sentence that many would have said was quite light given the horrific nature of the crime committed:

In United States v. Stewart, the criminal possessed thousands of images of child porn and also hoped to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl. The Guidelines called for a sentence of 97-121 months. Judge Jackson sentenced the criminal to just 57 months.

And that’s just one case; Hawley lists a number of them in the thread.

Jackson, for her part, attempted to rebut Hawley’s accusations, saying, as Fox reports:

“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, [t]hese are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with” as they involve pictures of the abuse of children and how judges must read “graphic descriptions” during sentencing.

“That statute doesn’t say look only at the guidelines and stop, the statute doesn’t say impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime. The statute says calculate the guidelines, but also look at various aspects of this offense and impose a sentence that is, quote, sufficient, but not greater than necessary to promote the purposes of punishment.”

Left unsaid by Jackson, however, was why she thought people who abused young girls or watched videos of children being abused deserved lighter sentences.

Hawley immediately responded to her attempted rebuttal with a Twitter “fact-check,” saying:

FACT CHECK: In the case of U.S. v. Driscoll, Missouri judge Sarah Pitlyk imposed the exact sentence—60 months—the government intended to seek. By contrast, Judge Jackson went below the government’s recommendation every time she could. There’s no comparison.

Hopefully, Hawley will hit Jackson over these cases and statements in the hearing too, not just on Twitter.

By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.

This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics