WATCH: Ketanji Brown Jackson refutes Josh Hawley's accusations about letting child porn offenders ‘off the hook’
Kicking off the second day of hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) gave the judge free rein to respond to attacks from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that she is soft on child pornographers and pedophiles.
"Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker," the Republican senator claimed in a tweet. "She’s been advocating for it since law school. This goes beyond ‘soft on crime.’ I’m concerned that this a record that endangers our children."
Hawley has come under fire for his attacks on the judge, with a National Review columnist calling his comments a "smear" and "dishonest" and a Daily Beast conservative columnist labeling his line of attack "scummy."
The judge explained exactly how she handled sentencing of convicted sex offenders.
"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," she said of Hawley's claims. "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, we're talking about graphic descriptions that judges have to read and consider when they decide how to sentence in these cases, and there is a statute that tells judges what they're supposed to do. Congress has decided what it is that a judge has to do in this and any other case when they sentence. And that statute, that statute doesn't say look only at the guidelines and stop, the statute doesn't say impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime."
"The statute says calculate the guidelines, but also look at various aspects of this offense and impose a sentence that is, quote, sufficient but not greater than necessary to promote the purposes of punishment," she elaborated. "And in every case, when I am dealing with something like this, it is important to me to make sure that the children's perspective, the children's voices are represented in my sentencings, and 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, they collected these things on the internet and it's fine, I tell them about the victims' statements that have come in to me as a judge."
"I tell them about the adults who are former child sex abuse victims who tell me that they will never have a normal adult relationship, because of this abuse. 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," she continued. "And the one that was the most telling to me, that I describe at almost every one of these sentencings when I look in the eyes of a defendant who is weeping because I'm giving him a significant sentence, what I say to him is do you know that 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, will have seen her pictures on the internet, they're out there forever at the most vulnerable time of her life, and so she is paralyzed."
"I tell that story to every child porn defendant as a part of my sentencings, so that they understand what they have done," she stated. "I say to them, that there is only a market for this kind of material because there are lookers; that you are contributing to child sex abuse and then I impose a significant sentence, and all of the additional restraints that are available in the law."
"These people are looking at 20, 30, 40 years of supervision, they can't use their computers in a normal way for decades. I am imposing all of those constraints because I understand how significant, how damaging, how horrible this crime is," she concluded.
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