WATCH: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Won't Say If She 'Regrets' Short Child Porn Sentences

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would not say Wednesday that she “regrets” a short sentence given to a convicted child pornography offender, but did “regret” that Senators focused on these cases in her Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) asked Judge Jackson about the three-month sentence she handed down to an eighteen-year-old offender in the case of U.S. v. Hawkins (2013), when sentencing guidelines suggested between 97 and 120 month in prison and the prosecutors were recommending at least two years. “My question is: do you regret it, or not?” Sen. Hawley asked.

“Senator, what I regret is that in a hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences and I’ve tried to explain,” she began, before he repeated his question.

Judge Jackson emphasized that she cared deeply about these cases, and that they had affected her emotionally, as a mother of daughters and as a relative of law enforcement officers. She also repeatedly said that “no one case” should define her record.

Democrats had initially claimed that Hawley had misrepresented her record. When that failed, they began arguing that she had raised legitimate policy questions about sentencing guidelines that Congress had declined to resolve. They also tried to accuse Hawley of hypocrisy because a federal judge whom he had supported had once deviated from sentencing guidelines.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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