Senate Republicans have been aggressively pointing out Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record of being soft on crime, particularly with sex offenders and child pornographers. It’s actually difficult to watch Jackson explaining her reasoning, and Senate Democrats trying to defend her on these points.
One such case that has been given significant attention involves a sex offender who was given a sentence of three months in prison despite sentencing guidelines recommending ten years.
“In the case of United States v. Hawkins, the sex offender had multiple images of child porn. He was over 18. The Sentencing Guidelines called for a sentence of up to 10 years,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) pointed out. “Judge Jackson sentenced the perpetrator to only three months in prison. Three months.”
This case is even more troubling because after the offender served his ridiculously and offensively short sentence, he went right back to looking for “sexually arousing” images of young children.
“A person familiar with the Hawkins case read to The Post the probation office request that led to Jackson’s order. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss it,” the Washington Post reported this week. “The probation office petition did not allege that Hawkins committed any new sexual offense or violation of conditions. However, it stated that ‘despite being in treatment for more than five years,’ Hawkins ‘continues to seek out sexually arousing, non-pornographic material and images of males 13 to 16-years-old.'”
“My question is: do you regret it or not?” Sen. Hawley asked Jackson on Wednesday regarding her lenient sentence for Hawkins.
She refused to say that she did. “Senator, what I regret is that in a hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences and I’ve tried to explain.”
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