One of the main reasons I thought it was a blunder for Senator Josh Hawley to brand Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as indulgent of “sex offenders” who “prey on children” is that it would undermine a legitimate inquiry into her sentencing practices across the board.
As I’ve tried to demonstrate, if you wanted to make that case, you could not choose a worse subject matter than child pornography. The frustration with the federal sentencing guidelines in these cases is intense and bipartisan. It has emerged from the hearings that, in most cases, judges depart from the guidelines. As I showed with respect to the seven specific cases Senator Hawley cited, and as was illuminated by the senator’s very civil and fair questioning of Judge Jackson during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing late Tuesday afternoon, it is common for the prosecutors to recommend a sentence below the guidelines range, so it should hardly be surprising that the judge would do so.
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