Black women feel sting of ‘traumatizing’ Jackson hearings

Overall, during her time on the district court bench, Jackson presided over 14 total cases of child sexual abuse, interstate travel for child sexual abuse cases and child pornography.

The American Bar Association’s standing committee on the federal judiciary said in its survey of some 250 judges, attorneys and academics that words such as “brilliant,” “beyond reproach,” “fair” were used to describe Jackson, who earned the panel’s highest rating.

“They uniformly rejected any accusations of bias,” said Jean Veta of the ABA committee.

In a letter to the Senate committee, Fred Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor and former federal prosecutor, spoke of his dismay at the thought Jackson was somehow “soft” on these crimes. His letter was signed by other experts in the field.

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates blasted the Republican line of questioning as an “embarrassing conspiracy theory” that “has been conclusively debunked by fact check after fact check.”

But alone before the panel, Jackson had difficulty convincing the Republican senators as she worked to explain the rules judges adhere to and the nuances of the wrenching cases they face. The GOP senators rarely accepted the judge’s answers and interjected or just ignored her explanations altogether.