Conservatives are right to pillory liberal judges such as those of the New York State Court of Appeals who ruled a quarter-century ago that child pornography was protected by the First Amendment.
Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court soon decreed otherwise, and the very first case after that restoration of decency was handled by a young Manhattan prosecutor named Sonia Sotomayor.
She has now gone on to become the first Hispanic woman nominated to the Supreme Court, but she does not neatly fit any other labels the aggressively dumb right-wing pundits like to employ.
If Sotomayor seemed a liberal when starting out as a prosecutor handling a parade of the disadvantaged charged with petty misdemeanors, she became harder to categorize after she graduated to more serious cases involving undeniable evil.
A number of the jurors in the child pornography case were reduced to tears when Sotomayor and fellow prosecutor
Karen Greve Milton screened the films the two defendants had sold to an undercover detective in Times Square. The children were as young as 7.
"I saw children exploited and abused," Sotomayor recalled Monday in the prepared statement at her confirmation hearing.
Jurors in another case, one with multiple adult homicides, were left in tears after Sotomayor questioned a victim’s sister on the stand. Sotomayor gently led the sister through the heartbreaking moments after her brother was shot in the face by a killer known as the Tarzan burglar.
"I felt the pain and suffering of families torn apart by the needless death of loved ones," Sotomayor told the senators.
Throughout her five years with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Sotomayor adhered to the same principles that carried her from the Bronxdale Houses to Princeton and Yale Law School, principles any true conservative has to admire.
"Extremely hardworking, diligent,
focused, organized," Milton said of her former colleague in the child porno case.
Hugh Mo, senior prosecutor in the Tarzan burglar case, summed up what continued carrying Sotomayor on to the federal bench and the U.S. Supreme Court nomination.
"She has a sense of purpose," Mo said Monday.
Purpose, not agenda was the prime force behind the conviction of both defendants in the child porno case. Clemente D'Alessio and Scott Hyman were
sentenced to 2¼ to seven years.
In the Tarzan case, Richard Maddicks was convicted of three murders along with so many burglary, assault and weapon charges that Sotomayor prepared a chart for the jurors.
Maddicks was sentenced to 62½ years, and it was unlikely he managed to watch Monday's hearing. The two TVs per housing unit at the
Sullivan Correctional Facility are on only at night and not likely ever tuned to replays of Senate hearings.
One case where Sotomayor did not fully prevail despite her hard work involved three young men charged with firing a shot in dispute at the Baruch Houses on the lower East Side in 1983.
Only one had wielded the gun, but Sotomayor felt the law held the others to be equally responsible. All three happened to be Puerto Rican, and she demonstrated way back then how silly it is to call her a racist who favors her own kind.
"She wanted all three to go down and go to prison," recalled defense attorney Stephen Goldenberg.
At the close of one session, a legal issue arose and the judge instructed both sides to present their arguments in the morning. Sotomayor arrived with a fully researched brief.
"Our luck to get a DA who goes home at night and writes briefs," Goldenberg
recalled. "You want her to go out at night and drink."
Even so, only the shooter was convicted. Joey Pacheco served nearly four years even though nobody had actually been shot.
"I guess she figured a bystander could get hit," Goldenberg said.
In this city where innocents are regularly felled by stray bullets, we should wish all gun collars were prosecuted with that intensity.
Anybody who really thinks she is a liberal racist should look up that Puerto
Rican gentleman who fired a shot in the Baruch Houses.
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