Pro-life Sen. Josh Hawley expressed alarm Wednesday about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “soft” record on child sex offenders amid growing concerns about protecting children from abuse.
Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, also has a pro-abortion record that includes working with abortion activists on a case about suppressing pro-life advocates’ free speech.
Her record on unborn babies’ rights has pro-life advocates opposing her nomination. Now, Hawley’s findings are raising additional concerns about other vulnerable children.
“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 Missouri Republican wrote on Twitter.
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“This is a disturbing record for any judge, but especially one nominated to the highest court in the land,” Hawley continued. “Protecting the most vulnerable shouldn’t be up for debate. Sending child predators to jail shouldn’t be controversial.”
A lawyer, Hawley said he recently began researching Jackson’s legal record and was disturbed to notice “an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.”
“In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley said.
He cited several examples, including a case where a criminal possessed thousands of images of child pornography and wanted to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl. The senator said guidelines call for a sentence of 97 to 121 months, but Jackson sentenced the criminal to only 57 months.
In another case, Jackson gave a lesser sentence to a man who distributed more than 100 child pornography videos and sent lewd images to his own 10-year-old daughter, he continued.
“This goes beyond ‘soft on crime.’ I’m concerned that this is a record that endangers our children,” he said.
Here’s more from Townhall:
[Another] example Hawley found in his review showed Judge Jackson fretting about convicted sex offenders being forced to register and suggesting such policies are driven by a “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge.”
Hawley found that Judge Jackson “has also questioned sending dangerous sex offenders to civil commitment,” and “as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Judge Jackson advocated for drastic change in how the law treats sex offenders by eliminating the existing mandatory minimum sentences for child porn.”
Her comments about child sex offenders also alarmed Hawley.
“Judge Jackson has opined there may be a type of ‘less-serious child pornography offender’ whose motivation is not sexual but ‘is the challenge, or to use the technology.’ A ‘less-serious’ child porn offender?” he wrote, citing her testimony.
Another example, “Jackson has said that some people who possess child porn ‘are in this for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community,’” Hawley continued. “What community would that be? The community of child exploiters?”
The senator also expressed frustration about the U.S. Sentencing Commission refusing to release all of Jackson’s records. He demanded that “all relevant records” be released, especially in light of his recent discoveries.
Hawley’s findings come amid growing concerns among parents about sex being pushed on younger and younger children through school sex education programs (often run by pro-abortion groups), “sexy” summer camps, entertainment media like the “Cuties” film on Netflix and more.
There also appears to be a growing push to normalize pedophilia. An ethics professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia recently was exposed for saying it “is not obvious” to him that an adult having sex with a willing child is wrong.
