Soon after her nomination, it was reported that as a law student in 1996, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a Harvard Law Review note analyzing the constitutionality of sex offense registries and that during her judicial career she did not always give the maximum sentence in child pornography cases. Unsurprisingly, she was immediately accused by Sen. Josh Hawley of “endangering our children” and not “protecting the most vulnerable.”
These entirely meritless allegations show the extreme risks of speaking the truth about our disastrous and cruel sex offense legal regime. While even conservatives defended her moderate and even “mainstream” child pornography sentencing history, calling the attack a “smear” that “appears meritless to the point of demagoguery,” others said it’s fair to “criticize her for giving too little weight to the public interest in protecting children from sexual predators” because of her early writing analyzing registries.
While it’s political par for the course for judges who don’t dole out the harshest imaginable prison terms to face allegations they are “soft on crime,” there’s a profound and substantive difference in kind when facing the toxic charge of being “soft on child predators” and not caring about children.
