As we await an announcement about who President Biden will nominate to the Supreme Court, it is worth remembering how, in just over one year, he has worked to reshape the make-up of the federal courts.
Nearly 30% of Biden’s nominees to the federal bench have been public defenders, 24% have been civil rights lawyers and 8% labor attorneys. By the end of his first year, Biden had won confirmation of 40 judges, the most since President Ronald Reagan. Of those, 80% are women and 53% are people of color, according to the White House.
Biden's nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Nina Morrison, has a particularly unique background.
Nina has been an attorney at the Innocence Project ("IP") since 2002, where she helped lead the IP's growth from a small, law-school based legal clinic to a national criminal justice reform organization. To date, Nina has served as lead or co-counsel for approximately thirty innocent prisoners who were freed from prison or death row based on DNA or other newly discovered evidence. In her role as Senior Litigation Counsel, Nina also leads the IP's initiatives on prosecutorial accountability and reform. She frequently advises prosecutors, judges, and defense counsel about how to prevent wrongful convictions and improve prosecutorial practices...
Before joining the Innocence Project, Nina was an attorney with the firm of Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff & Abady PC, specializing in civil rights litigation. From 1992 to 1995 she was an investigator with the California Appellate Project, which represents California's death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings.
The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck to use DNA testing to exonerate those who had been wrongfully convicted of a crime. To date, 375 people in the United States - who had served an average of 14 years each in prison - have been exonerated by DNA testing. But as Philip Bump pointed out, freeing those who have been wrongfully convicted is only one side of the coin.
There are two positive effects that follow from allowing an innocent person to be freed from prison following an improper conviction. The most obvious is that the innocent person is now free, able to reconstruct his or her life as much as is possible. Less obvious is that it also allows the system to actually find the criminal who committed the crime in the first place.
Bump talked to Tricia Rojo Bushnell, president of the Innocence Network, and further learned that, of those 375 exonerations, “the actual perpetrator was identified in 165 cases.” What's more, she told him that “Those people, because they were not convicted in the cases the wrong person was, went on to be convicted of 154 additional violent crimes, including 83 sexual assaults, 36 murders and 35 other types of violent crimes.”
In other words, ensuring that the guilty person is convicted of a crime is one of many ways that we can be smart on crime - making someone like Morrison an excellent choice to serve on the U.S. District Court.
But at Morrison's confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Senators Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley demonstrated that they'd rather be dumb on crime. Those three senators disdainfully grilled Morrison about her past work, writings, and associations. Hawley summed things up by stating that he wouldn't support any Biden judicial nominees who are "soft on crime and soft on criminals." Similarly, Cruz said that “Your nomination is part of a pattern from this administration, and Democrats in the Senate, if they follow their pattern, will vote to [confirm] yet another judge who will let more violent criminals go.”
During his questioning, Cotton brought up a case from Arkansas involving Ledell Lee, who was executed in 2017 for the 1993 murder of a 26-year-old woman, Debra Reese. But four years after he was executed, a different man’s DNA was found on the murder weapon, which had not been previously tested. Morrison, who has taken on Lee's sister as a client, noted that there was “compelling evidence” that he might have been innocent of the crime. In response, Cotton threw up his hands and declared: "Compelling evidence that the court somehow overlooked for 20 years?" As Charles Pierce noted:
To hell with legislative research, has Cotton seen a movie in the past 20 years? Has he watched the news? Innocent people have been walking out of prisons after decades of mistaken incarceration.
I would remind you that Senator Cotton is the one who thinks that we have an "under-incarceration problem" in this country and recently stated that the minimal criminal justice reforms of the First Step Act were "the worst mistake of the Trump administration."
Keeping innocent people locked up for crimes they didn't commit, while letting the actual perpetrators remain free to harm more victims, isn't just a matter of being dumb on crime...it's immoral. This country should have nothing but disdain for these three senators.
Nancy, this is a solid article to do away with the death penalty which does nothing to avert future murders, but only pads the resumes of prosecutors and lawyers. The public is badly served with the death penalty in that the state legal reviews that pertain to every such judgment become expensive to the public, take years and often do little to cap the numbers of murders. It's only a public demonstration of legal animosity and some version of public retribution which restores no-one to 'humanity.' (I can say this from personal, family experience, the details of which are not important here.) And, these three hate-mongers are prime examples of politicians who will search for and grab onto punitive measures for the publicity they bring. I am once again reminded of tramp's call for immediate executions of the 'Central Park Five'. (and if that had happened, the public would have likely taken little interest and the legal system would have been corrupted in ways to protect djt.) Thanks for including this article. And, yes, it's quite embarrassing that these three call for the rejection of such an expert legal mind as Nina Morrison. I'd say they should be ashamed, but I'm pretty sure that none of them is capable of feeling shame.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Nancy's subject for me points to two things. First, conservatives have their hot buttons that resonate with a certain mindset, but it has zero to do with helping people, including working people or, here, people who fear crime. Second, it's a tried and true strategy going back a long way: looking for the hot buttons that work with those who thin they're "us" in "us vs them." And that includes the old "soft" buttons: soft on crime, soft on commies, soft on China, etc., etc. (It's true that Trump's love of those he sees as on his side, especially totalitarian leaders, have made "soft on Russia" trickier, but the GOP finesses the two drives as best it can when it comes to Russia.)
ReplyDeleteMuch as I'm tired of Kevin Drum's neo-lib phase, his post last week about the soft on foreign policy characterization really appalled me. He complained that Sanders and the left as a whole were pretending that it's always and only an act of courage not to go to war. That overlooks the whole history here, and it pretends that Sanders and progressives have vowed never to go to war. We're not talking conscientious objectors who would have stayed out of WWII, for goodness sake. If they used tough rhetoric, good for them. In the same way, are there really liberals who take a hard line that no one should ever go to prison? Maybe somewhere, but it's not what the men Nancy's subject here have in mind. They're deliberately attacking straw men (and women).