Leth reviewed My beloved world by Sonia Sotomayor
Remember that the "Good One" got on SCOTUS by caging human beings
1 star
I saw Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography at the library and got curious as to WHY she decided to become a prosecutor. Her recollection of law school is about her wanting to become a corporate lawyer.
But then her school had a public interest career paths dinner and a prosecutor spoke.
Absolutely zero self-reflection on her days as a prosecutor. She talks about starting during "a crime wave of tsunamic proportions" where people create threats to public safety. Then, "To make matters worse, rising tensions brought a rising number of police brutality complaints." When police do something wrong, they're not an actor.
She says she lost her first trial in part because the defendant's grandfather had a heart attack. This is cartoonish buffoonery.
For her second trial, she tried to force a wife to testify against her husband. The wife scheduled an abortion on the day she was …
I saw Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography at the library and got curious as to WHY she decided to become a prosecutor. Her recollection of law school is about her wanting to become a corporate lawyer.
But then her school had a public interest career paths dinner and a prosecutor spoke.
Absolutely zero self-reflection on her days as a prosecutor. She talks about starting during "a crime wave of tsunamic proportions" where people create threats to public safety. Then, "To make matters worse, rising tensions brought a rising number of police brutality complaints." When police do something wrong, they're not an actor.
She says she lost her first trial in part because the defendant's grandfather had a heart attack. This is cartoonish buffoonery.
For her second trial, she tried to force a wife to testify against her husband. The wife scheduled an abortion on the day she was set to testify, which Sotomayor describes as "a fair excuse". Sotomayor briefly mentions that she felt sad and guilty—"What had I set in motion by pursuing her?"—then reassures herself that "My action could not have reasonably provoked the decision, but by the time violence enters a marriage, often reason has receded."
What the fuck.
Sotomayor gets the guy convicted and argues that he shouldn't be in jail in part because of her feelings about the wife's abortion. But then assures the reader that she hates domestic violence and that jail would be "the only absolute insurance against his striking his wife".
"[K]nowing that the poor and minorities are disproportionately the victims of crime, I'm loath to view the adversarial process of the law as class warfare by another name." Yeah, sure, weird coincidence that the police terrorize marginalized communities and that people from marginalized communities tend to be overrepresented as victims of crimes observed by police.
There is literally a story in here where she decided to do nothing and the defendant's life drastically improved within two years. No systemic analysis. No reflection on what that suggests about her choices in the prosecutorial role.
"Notching up top-count convictions—convictions for the most serious charges—while giving up little ground in plea bargains became the adult equivalent of collecting gold stars in fifth grade. I liked the particular challenge of taking cases to trial with unsympathetic victims and unreliable witnesses...."
Evil.
"With each prosecutor handling around a hundred cases at a time, expediency and rough justice were the order of the day. We fudged, we made do with the tools at hand, we performed triage in the trenches, but we still made an effort to do it with integrity."
EVIL.
She spends a curious amount of time discussing her decisions not to prosecute in comparison to sweeping over her many convictions.
Just a huge reminder that the only nice thing that you can say about every prosecutor is that they are not paid to be mean. They do that shit because they like to be mean.
