the picture that those Republicans painted of Sotomayor doesn’t seem to be supported by her actions. The Scotusblog examined her court of appeals decisions in race-related cases and found that she rejected claims of discrimination 80 percent of the time.
Op-Ed Columnist – Pot, Meet Kettle – NYTimes.com
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.
scotusblog: Judge Sotomayor and Race — Results from the Full Data Set
I’m waiting for the right wing and the libertarian spit-ballers to shift their arguments against Sotomayor. I’m guessing they’ll claim that the facts don’t actually demonstrate that she is able to be impartial but instead show that she is biased and incompetent at exercising her biases.
