What GOP senators seem to mind most about Ketanji Brown Jackson is what I most admire

The thing that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee most seem to mind about Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is what I most admire. I refer, of course, to her service as a federal public defender.

That she’ll God willing be the first Supreme Court justice with that experience is pretty stunning. If confirmed, she’ll be the first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have spent any significant time representing indigent criminal defendants.

She was only in that job for two years. But even that brief experience sets her apart as someone who ever had a job representing the destitute and despised. She will be the only one on that court who has sat in jails interviewing clients who otherwise would have faced a system already stacked against them all alone.

So what she’ll bring to the court is only this: A view that’s been missing for a long, long time.

I shouldn’t need to say that some clients who can’t afford to hire a lawyer are innocent, and they deserve representation. Or that others are guilty, and they do, too.

The Sixth Amendment guarantee of legal representation for all defendants is so basic to our system that I wouldn’t even mention it. Except that in listening to the questioning of Brown Jackson over the last couple of days, I realized that some of the best educated lawyers on the committee show no sign that they actually believe in what the Constitution promises, which is that every single person accused of a crime deserves the most robust possible defense.

Lindsey Graham implied that because Brown Jackson had at one point been assigned to represent four accused terrorists being held in Gitmo, she must have common cause with enemy combatants.

Because she later wrote amicus briefs arguing that such detainees should not be held indefinitely without trial, even though she wrote these briefs on behalf of the libertarian Cato Institute and other clients, Graham argued that in doing that kind of legal work, “you’re putting America in an untenable position.”

“If you had your way,” he said, terrorists would have to have been released or tried rather than periodically reviewed as potential threats. “What made you join this cause?”

Conflating an attorney and that attorney’s client is nothing new, but it is incredibly disingenuous, especially coming from a bunch of lawyers.

At a hearing earlier this month on Biden’s nomination of another Black woman, former public defender Arianna Freeman, to the Third Circuit, Ted Cruz accused her of “siding with capital murderers” she had represented in court. Josh Hawley said he assumed Freeman didn’t believe in capital punishment since she’d argued against it on behalf of an indigent client. Again, as required by that document that you gentlemen say you hold so dear.

Hawley, Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Lee and others also at least pretended to believe that Brown Jackson coddles pedophiles because she, like the majority of federal judges, has handed out sentences in child porn cases that were shorter than those set out in federal guidelines.

Cotton called her “sympathetic to a drug fentanyl kingpin” because of a sentence reduction she handed down in keeping with the First Step Act that Donald Trump signed into law.

I know from the mail I get whenever I write about anyone accused of a horrible crime that many people do not believe in the presumption of innocence, or see that the guilty, too, have every right to be treated fairly under the law.

So Ketanji Brown Jackson’s critics on the Senate Judiciary Committee are really just giving the people what they want by absurdly alleging that she is A-OK with terrorism, kiddie porn and more.

In response, she and her defenders keep saying that federal public defenders don’t get to choose their clients. But while that’s technically true, in a larger sense, I hate to hear her distancing herself from the clients she should be as proud to have represented as John Adams was to represent those British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre.

Melody Brannon, the federal public defender for the District of Kansas, told me that as she sees it, “I do choose my clients” in that “I would choose every one of them over again, because it’s a privilege” to stand with those no one else cares about when no one else will. And to try to make the court see that that client is more than the worst thing he or she ever did.

At great cost to their own health, the federal public defenders who represented Lisa Montgomery fought so hard for the severely ill, severely abused Kansas woman William Barr personally ordered put to death in the waning days of the Trump administration. Yes, her crime was awful: She’d cut a baby from her mother’s womb, and in the process had killed the child’s 23-year-old mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, of Skidmore, Missouri.

Yet her attorneys did everything they could to save the life of a woman who’d been routinely raped by her stepfather, a man who had also caused her permanent brain damage by repeatedly banging her head into their concrete driveway. Montgomery had been gang-raped by men who paid her mother to be left alone with her, and later had been forced to marry an abusive step-brother.

Montgomery’s attorneys became seriously ill with COVID after visiting her in federal prison, because even at the height of a breakout there, the Trump administration would not delay an execution that they feared the Biden administration would never carry out. Her execution was devastating to her legal team. Yet what they did for her and for all of us mattered, whether we appreciate it or not. And in case it has to be spelled out, they do that difficult work not because they believe in baby snatching or in murder, but because they believe in America.