After he attempted to swipe at Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson for a decision to grant a non-violent offender supervised parole, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s own record as a prosecutor of similar cases is coming under scrutiny.
Hawley falsely claimed that Jackson’s sentencing history showed a tendency to give light sentences to sexual predators. “Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker” Hawley tweeted, claiming it showed an “alarming trend of lenient sentencing.”
But Hawley’s own record shows that he was even less stringent with sexual offenders. The American Independent resurfaced an op/ed piece written by a former member of Hawley’s prosecution team when he was Missouri Attorney General. Knox County Sheriff Robert Becker was charged with domestic violence and sexual abuse for choking a former partner to near unconsciousness. Hawley approved a two-year probation deal for a defendant.
Hired by Hawley to work on human trafficking, attorney Pam Hamilton wrote an editorial in the Kansas City Star in January 2021 in which she states in the headline: “I was on Josh Hawley’s human trafficking task force. He sought TV cameras, not justice.”