Law professor defends Biden SCOTUS pick, says child porn sentencing guidelines 'unduly severe'

A law professor and sentencing policy expert argued against attacks that President Biden's Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson allegedly gave out lenient sentences to sex offenders and child predators.

Berman went on to cite a recent U.S. Sentencing Commission report that explains that the child pornography sentencing guideline fails "to distinguish adequately between more and less severe offenders," and that "most courts believe [the guideline] is generally too severe and does not appropriately measure offender culpability in the typical non-production child pornography case."

"With the CP guidelines ‘too severe’ and poorly designed to ‘measure offender culpability’ in the digital age, federal judges nationwide rarely follow them," wrote Berman. "Indeed, data in recent (and past) USSC reports document that Judge Jackson's record of imposing below-guideline CP sentences is quite mainstream because: (1) federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the CP guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases (p. 23), and (2) federal judges nationwide, when deciding to go below the CP guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum (p. 25)."