Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, has come under fire for authoring a paper for the Harvard Law Review in which she was critical of the “excessiveness” of punishments for sex offenders.
QUICK FACTS:
- Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson admitted that she previously authored a paper criticizing the “excessiveness” of sex offenders’ punishments, which she said could be “unfair and unnecessarily burdensome.”
- According to Just The News the paper was published by the Harvard Law Review in 1996 but Jackson disclosed the authorship when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to list published writings.
- In her paper, Jackson argued that courts haven’t been able to effectively differentiate between “preventive” and “punitive” punishments for sex offenders.
WHAT JACKSON’S PAPER SAID:
- In the current climate of fear, hatred, and revenge associated with the release of convicted sex criminals, courts must be especially attentive to legislative enactments that use[ ] public health and safety rhetoric to justify procedures that are, in essence, punishment and detention,” Jackson writes.
- “Judges should abandon the prevention/punishment analyses that rely on legislative intent, that routinely apply the Kennedy factors, and that assess the “excessiveness” of a sex offender statute’s punitive effects in favor of a more principled approach to characterization.
- “[E]ven in the face of understandable public outrage over repeat sexual predators, a principled prevention/punishment analysis evaluates the effect of the challenged legislation in a manner that reinforces constitutional safeguards against unfair and unnecessarily burdensome legislative action,” she wrote.
BACKGROUND:
- Jackson was the subject of an investigation by the American Accountability Foundation which found that she has argued that the American justice system is unfair to sexual predators.
- The foundation reported that the article was originally an “unsigned note” in the Harvard Law Review and she only recently claimed the article.
