It is up to Congress to make the laws tougher on child pornography.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wiped away tears as Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., delivered a passionate speech on how she earned her spot to become the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court.
Sen. Booker stood up for her on every level. This is just so good. Cory Booker fought for her in every way and even against Senator Josh Hawley from St. Louis. He told her she is worthy, God has got her. Cory Booker is an angel and Senator Hawley from Missouri is the devil. Ted Cruz could not criticize Trump for 4 years because he wants Trump’s voters. All Josh Hawley wanted to do was talk about and child pornography.
“The demography of individuals convicted of sexual abuse offenses is more mixed; 42 percent are White, 18 percent are Black, 10 percent are Hispanic, and 31 percent are Native American,” with the large percentage of Native Americans in this offense type explained by the fact that it likely reflects the legal jurisdiction of the federal government on Native American lands or reservations, the authors write.
To put this into statistical context, the authors write that Black individuals convicted of sexual abuse during FY 2006-2017 had a 1,330.47 percent increase in their sentences, whereas White individuals saw a decrease of 8.66 percent in their sentences.
The authors say the findings of this study add to growing research that in sex abuse cases and child pornography cases, convicted individuals who are Black and Hispanic are receiving harsher punishments over time — even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, criminal history, and offense seriousness, USA Today reported.
Independent fact-checkers also found Hawley’s claims to be lacking. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave three Pinocchios for “selectively quoting” Jackson and ignoring “a long debate within the judicial community about whether mandatory minimums were too high.” The Associated Press found that Republicans twisted her record.
Some other Republicans on the committee, including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Mike Lee of Utah, have also expressed concerns about Jackson’s sentencing record.
During her opening remarks on Monday, Blackburn said Jackson has a “consistent pattern of giving child porn offenders lighter sentences.”
“Your philosophy, it appears, is backward on these issues,” Blackburn claimed.
In 2021, long after Jackson left the agency, the Sentencing Commission found that most federal courts viewed the sentencing guidelines as overly severe.
The commission’s own statistics portray how Jackson, as a federal district judge, was well within the mainstream of her peers on the bench. Federal guidelines were followed in less than 30% of cases in the fiscal year 2019. The commission urged Congress to reexamine the issue then, but lawmakers failed to do so.
Crucially, Gertner told Insider, the federal government itself began to stop pushing the harshest allowable sentences. The 2019 statistics found that the Trump-era Justice Department called for a below-guideline sentence in roughly 20% of the applicable cases.
“Judge Jackson’s record is entirely consistent with what judges did across the country, Republicans, and Democrats,” Gertner, who is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, told Insider. “The guidelines lumped in the same category offenders who were really remotely not the same.”
