Judge Jackson, Child Porn and Gitmo Detainees

If Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is going to become the next  justice -- and the first Black woman -- to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, she may have to do so without any support from Senate Republicans, if this week's confirmation hearings are an indication of how the upcoming vote will go.

During several rounds of questioning that were at times contentious, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Jackson on her record as a federal judge and as a public defender. They repeatedly zeroed in on two issues of concern in particular: her sentencing of defendants in child pornography cases and her past work defending individuals detained at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn was one of the senators to do so.

The Tennessee Republican said that Jackson used her "time and talent not to serve our nation's veterans or other vulnerable groups, but to provide free legal services to help terrorists get out of Gitmo and go back to the fight." She also accused Jackson of displaying "a consistent pattern of giving child porn offenders lighter sentences" than the sentences recommended by federal sentencing guidelines. Blackburn added, "On average, you sentence child porn defendants to over five years below the minimum sentence recommended by the sentencing guidelines."

However, in our review of seven child porn cases that Jackson oversaw, the sentencing guidelines called for a minimum of 90 months, on average, and Jackson's average sentence was 45 months -- or 3 years and 9 months below the minimum sentencing guidelines.

Furthermore, Jackson is not the only judge to have given "lighter sentences" in such cases. The majority of sentences for defendants convicted of non-production child pornography in fiscal year 2019 were below the minimum sentencing guidelines, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

As for her work on behalf of detainees, Jackson was a federal public defender on four cases, in which the men were not convicted. She also continued to represent one of those men when she later worked for a private firm. The year before she joined the Office of the Federal Public Defender, the Supreme Court had ruled that foreign citizens held at Guantanamo had a right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.

For our full review of the facts in these cases, read "The Facts on Judge Jackson’s Sentencing in Child Porn Cases" and "The Facts on Judge Jackson’s Defense Work for Gitmo Detainees."

Reader: How many illegal aliens are crossing the borders of the U.S. per month? My friend suggests "millions of illegal aliens are crossing the borders every month."  Help me and my friend understand who is coming into the United States illegally.

FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: There has been a significant increase in the number of people apprehended trying to cross the border illegally, but it is nowhere close to “millions” every month.

Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley wrote about this topic last month in his story “Cotton Distorts Border Apprehension Impact.” At the time, Rob wrote that there had been nearly 1.9 million apprehensions of people trying to illegally cross the southern border from February 2021 through December, or more than 170,000 per month. That is based on data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

But most of them were immediately sent back to their home countries.

As Rob writes:

"During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Nov. 16, Sen. Lindsey Graham noted there were about 1.7 million people at that time who had been apprehended during Biden’s presidency while attempting to cross the southern border illegally. Graham asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for a breakdown for how many of those are 'still here.'

Mayorkas noted that approximately 965,000 of them were immediately expelled under Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration began invoking at the southwest border in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic (and which Biden has continued in a modified form). Another roughly 40,000 were removed under other immigration authorities. About 125,000 of them were unaccompanied children who were transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and remained in the country. And another roughly 375,000 were released in the U.S. pending immigration enforcement proceedings — or, as Graham said, they were 'still here.'

So that comes to about a half million who remained in the U.S., although most were facing immigration enforcement proceedings, which could ultimately end in deportation.

Graham said that left about 230,000 unaccounted for, but as Mayorkas explained, not all of those apprehensions represent different people. In fiscal year 2021 there was a recidivism rate — meaning the share of people caught crossing more than once — of 27%. If that rate were applied to apprehensions during Biden’s time in office, it would mean that of the roughly 1.9 million apprehensions, about 1.4 million were different people."

I hope that helps.

Wrapping Up

Here's what else we've got for you this week:

• "Judge Jackson and Critical Race Theory": Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson says her passing mention of critical race theory in a 2015 speech was about “sentencing policy and all of the different academic disciplines that might relate to it.” She said the theory has not been a part of any decisions she has made as a judge.
   
• "Misleading 'Defund the Police' Attack on Dr. Oz": Dr. Mehmet Oz has been outspoken about opposing defunding the police. But an ad from a conservative super PAC misleadingly claims that the Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate was "a spokesman for a group who wanted to defund the police."
   
• "Video Shows Climate Protest in Austria, Not 'Crisis Actors' in Ukraine": The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a barrage of false claims on social media, including posts that purport to show a video of “crisis actors” portraying dead victims of the fighting. The video used in the posts is from a climate protest held in Vienna, Austria, weeks before the war in Ukraine began.
   
• "Marjorie Taylor Greene Parrots Russian Talking Point on Ukraine": Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene parroted a Russian talking point with her claim that Ukraine is a country whose "government only exists because the Obama State Department helped to overthrow the previous regime."
   
• "Posts Misinterpret Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring Document": A Pfizer document recently released by the Food and Drug Administration describes adverse events reported following vaccination and attests to the continued safety of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. A popular video and other online posts, however, incorrectly imply that the vaccine caused the events. Many posts also wrongly assume that a long list of health issues Pfizer is monitoring for occurred and were due to vaccination.
   
• "Zelensky Remains in Ukraine, Despite False Claims on Social Media": Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appeared in several recent videos that show he has remained in the country since Russia invaded on Feb. 24. But a post circulating on Facebook falsely claims he fled and recorded a video using a green screen to make it appear as though he’s still in Ukraine. There’s no evidence to support the claim. A digital forensics expert told us that nothing in the video indicates it was filmed using a green screen.
   
• "Polio Vaccine Is a Four-Shot Series, Contrary to Greene Comments": The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it “recommends that children get four doses of polio vaccine.” But Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, when speaking against a potential fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, wrongly suggested that the CDC doesn’t recommend four shots of the polio vaccine.

• "La vacuna contra la poliomielitis es una serie de cuatro dosis, al contrario de los comentarios de Greene ": Los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC, por sus siglas en inglés) dicen que “recomiendan ponerles cuatro dosis de la vacuna contra la poliomielitis a los niños”, con la última de ellas entre los 4 y 6 años de edad. Pero al hablar contra una posible cuarta dosis de las vacunas contra el COVID-19, la representante Marjorie Taylor Greene, sugirió erróneamente que los CDC no recomiendan cuatro dosis de la vacuna contra la poliomielitis.
   
• "Lo que hemos aprendido sobre los llamados ‘confinamientos’ y la pandemia del COVID-19": Muchos estudios revisados por pares han encontrado que las restricciones gubernamentales en las primeras etapas de la pandemia, como los cierres de negocios y las medidas de distanciamiento físico, redujeron los casos de COVID-19 y/o la mortalidad, en comparación con lo que habría ocurrido sin esas medidas. Pero medios de comunicación y comentaristas conservadores han utilizado un documento de trabajo no publicado y muy criticado que concluyó que los “confinamientos” tuvieron solo un pequeño efecto en la mortalidad como evidencia definitiva de que las restricciones no funcionan.