Sunday, May 31, 2009

Do You Think You'd Get a Fair Trial from Sotomayor?

Let's assume you're a non-Latina and are in court before Judge Sotomayor. Do you believe you'll get a fair trial?

Remember that in a speech, she said "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

In Ricci vs. New Haven, she threw out a firefighter promotion test that was carefully constructed to be race-neutral with its items all testing relevant job skills just because 18 whites and no blacks passed the exam. Even Clinton-appointed Hispanic judge, Jose Cabranes was so disturbed by the decision that he sought to have it reconsidered by the full 2nd Circuit because it might involve "an unconstitutional racial quota or set-aside."

Among the most important qualifications for any judge, and certainly for a Supreme Court judge, is that when anyone, no matter their race, gender, etc., comes before that judge, that person can expect a fair trial. If you're being honest with yourself, if you were a white person, do you feel you could count on getting a fair trial from Judge Sotomayor?

And what does it say about President Obama's claiming to be post-racial when his first Supreme Court nominee is Sotomayor, his attorney general, Eric Holder is a huge reverse discrimination supporter and his education undersecretary for civil rights, Russlyn Ali, so often calls people racist when they dare disagree with her reverse-discrimination advocacy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think I would. The New Haven case was not settled by Sotomayor acting alone, but with two other judges. The law in the case was apparently pretty bright line stuff. The decision did not throw out the test - that was done several courts earlier. Rather, the decision did not reinstate the test.

The case has been heard by the Supremes recently. Be interesting to hear what they have to say on it - but the New Haven case is actually an example of Sotomayor not legislating from the bench.

In other cases, she's upheld the free speech rights of supremacist groups.

She is a hard judge to persuade on all sorts of discrimination cases, not seeing it proven in four-fifths of the actions which come to her. (How many of those are traditional and how many reverse, I do not know.)

VIQAR KJAN said...

very interesting and informative

 

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