During Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings last week, several Republican senators raised the issue of her lenient record in terms of sentencing for individuals convicted of child pornography crimes.
The extent of that leniency has now been made undeniably evident by way of a review of Judge Jackson’s record on such cases in comparison with the national average sentences for such crimes — and the difference is remarkable, according to Breitbart.
Jackson’s child porn sentences compared against the national average
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, repeatedly questioned Judge Jackson during the confirmation hearings with regard to the sentences she had handed down in several child porn cases — sentences that were routinely below the recommendations of probation offices, prosecutors, and even federal sentencing guidelines that Jackson herself helped craft.
In his subsequent review of Jackson’s sentencing record, Cruz found that in cases involving possession of child porn, Jackson issued an average sentence of just 29.2 months in comparison to a national average of 68 months, a 57 percent difference.
As for convictions involving the distribution of child porn, the judge delivered an average prison sentence of 71.9 months, a figure that is 47 percent less than the national average of 135 months behind bars for such crimes.
Breitbart further noted that Judge Jackson had overseen a single case involving the production of child porn and had sentenced that particular defendant to 180 months in prison, a sentence that was 35 percent less than the national average of 275 months.
Soft on other crimes, too
It isn’t just child porn cases where Judge Jackson appears to exemplify a “soft on crime” stance, however, as Sen. Cruz’s review also looked at the totality of all criminal cases of all sorts overseen by Jackson and compared her average sentences with those of her district and the nation more broadly.
What the senator found was that Jackson issued an average sentence of 29.9 months in all criminal cases, which was 24.9 percent lower than the 39.8 months average sentence in her Washington D.C. district and 33.8 percent lower than the national average of 45.1 months.
Along those lines, RealClearInvestigations similarly probed Judge Jackson’s record and found that, above and beyond her light sentences for child porn cases, the judge was also quite lenient concerning sentencing for a variety of other crimes.
Chief among those are individuals convicted of drug dealing — including those who were violent or used firearms in the commission of their crimes — who Jackson routinely and repeatedly advocated for either reduced sentences below federal guidelines and recommendations or early release for “compassionate” reasons.
In addition to going easy on drug traffickers and pedophiles, Jackson has also argued — successfully, in some cases — for the release of a few known and suspected terrorists detained in federal custody at Guantanamo Bay.
Judge Jackson will almost certainly be confirmed to the Supreme Court thanks to the slim Democratic majority — plus, perhaps, a few moderate Republicans — and while she alone won’t shift the current ideological balance of the court, she could be there for a few decades and could help shift the liberal faction, if not a majority of the justices overall, more toward the left in terms of criminal justice reform.
