President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson addressed allegations Tuesday that she gave lenient sentences to child pornography distributors, sharing with the Senate Judiciary Committee her experience dealing with such cases.
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had raised concerns last week that Jackson’s record demonstrates that she “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes.”
His announcement prompted House Republicans to send a letter Monday to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for a full investigation of Jackson’s past rulings as a judge.
That letter, which was first obtained by the Daily Caller, calls on the committee to specifically look into three child pornography cases from when Jackson was vice-chair of the U.S. sentencing commission.
“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 Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin on Tuesday morning. “These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with because we are talking about pictures of sex abuse of children, we are talking about graphic descriptions that judges have to read and consider when they decide how to sentence in these cases.”
WATCH:
Durbin: "Could you tell us what was going through your mind at that point [listening to Josh Hawley]?"
Ketanji Brown Jackson: "Thank you, senator. 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." pic.twitter.com/14kCWYEFIa
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 22, 2022
Jackson shared that when she deals with such cases, it is important to her to make sure that the “children’s perspective, the children’s voices are represented in my sentencing.”
“What that means is that for every defendant who comes before me and who suggests as they often do, that they’re just a looker, that these crimes don’t really matter, that they’ve collected these things on the internet, and its fine, I tell them about the victim statements that have come into me as a judge,” she said.
“I tell them about the adults who were former child sex abuse victims who tell me that they will never have a normal adult relationship because of this abuse,” Jackson continued. “I tell them about the ones who say I went into prostitution, I fell into drugs because I was trying to suppress the hurt that was done to me as an infant.”
WATCH:
Responding to Sen. Hawley’s allegations that she gave lenient sentencings to child pornography distributors, Judge Jackson describes how she deals with child pornography cases: pic.twitter.com/821lxTsO8P
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) March 22, 2022
Jackson also said that at almost every one of these sentencings, when she looks into the eyes of a defendant “who is weeping because” Jackson is giving him “a significant sentence,” she tells him, “Do you know there is someone who has written to me, and who has told me that she has developed agoraphobia, she cannot leave her house because she thinks that everyone she meets will have seen her pictures on the internet. They are out there forever, at the most vulnerable time of her life, and so she is paralyzed.”