U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has pushed back against misleading allegations that she supports light sentences for people convicted of child pornography offenses, saying that she keeps the victims front and center and imposes “significant” sentences in these types of cases.
“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,” Jackson told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, when he asked what she was thinking when Hawley repeated the widely–criticized and demonstrably false allegations from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that Jackson has a “long record” of letting child pornography offenders “off the hook.”
“These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with because we’re talking about pictures of sex abuse of children,” Jackson said. “We’re talking about graphic descriptions that judges have to read and consider when they decide how to sentence in these cases.”
Hawley accused Jackson, who has served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, of regularly issuing sentences lighter than what prosecutors recommended, even when that recommendation was the lowest available under statutory guidelines. He listed some cases during his remarks on the first day of Jackson’s confirmation hearings on Monday.
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