Hal O'Brien

"Wouldn't it be great if Judge Sonia Sotomayor had a decades-long paper trail detailing, in minute detail, her views on race, affirmative action, fairness and discrimination? If we did -- if we knew how she acted on her beliefs in past, we might be able to predict how she'd act on them in the future. Right?

Well......

Turns out that race comes up fairly frequently in legal proceedings adjudicated by United States courts of appeals. Sotomayor participated in 100 such cases."

"In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking."

"A divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld on Wednesday California's "three-strikes" law which gives up to life in prison for repeat offenders even if their last crime was minor theft like stealing golf clubs.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court ruled the law does not violate the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment.

In one case, the high court said it was constitutional for Gary Ewing to be sentenced to 25 years to life even though his last crime was stealing three golf clubs worth about $1,200.

In the other case, the justices by a 5-4 vote said a U.S. appeals court was wrong in overturning the sentence of two consecutive terms of 25 years to life for Leandro Andrade, who stole nine videotapes worth $153.

Ewing and Andrade had been convicted of a number of prior felonies. They argued the law unconstitutionally resulted in an unduly harsh sentence "grossly disproportionate" to the crime.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the majority opinion that in the Ewing case the three-strikes laws caused a dramatic change in criminal sentencing in the mid-1990s throughout the nation.

State legislatures "made a deliberate policy choice that individuals who have repeatedly engaged in serious or violent criminal behavior and whose conduct has not been deterred by more conventional approaches to punishment must be isolated from society ... to protect public safety," she said.

O'Connor said the Supreme Court has a long-standing tradition of deferring to state legislatures on such policy choices."