Nina Morrison
A confirmation hearing for one of President Biden's judicial nominees provided evidence that at least three U.S. senators, all Republicans, have little clue about how the U.S. criminal-justice system works. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), and Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) posed questions to nominee Nina Morrison that one journalist described as embarrassing.
What had the GOP trio worked up? It was Morrison's history of working with the Innocence Project, where she reportedly helped free more than 30 innocent people from prison and death row. Never mind that most third graders probably are familiar with the concept that an accused "is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law." In Morrison's case, she helped obtain justice for people who were innocent all along, even after being wrongly convicted. Writes HuffPost's Jennifer Bendery under the headline "Republicans Blame Crime On An Innocence Project Lawyer Tapped For A Judgeship; GOP senators accused Biden's court pick Nina Morrison, who has freed dozens of innocent people from prison, of fueling violent crimes. Huh?
In a hearing . . . that was as performative as it was embarrassingly ill-informed, Senate Republicans tried to blame one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees — Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project who has freed dozens of innocent people from prison — for driving up violent crime across America.
Morrison, 52, is up for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of New York. She is the senior litigation counsel at the New York-based Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
She has been lead or co-counsel on cases that have freed more than 30 innocent people from prison and death row.
But Republicans in the Judiciary Committee went after Morrison as if she had committed the crimes that her clients were convicted of — that they didn’t actually commit, either. They tried to blame her for recent spikes in violent crimes in cities, and pressed her on whether she felt guilty about freeing people from prison who had been convicted of violent crimes, glossing over the fact that they had been exonerated by DNA evidence.
“The whole of your record is deeply disturbing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Morrison.
“Across this country, Americans are horrified at skyrocketing crime rates, at skyrocketing homicide rates, at skyrocketing burglary rates, at skyrocketing carjacking rates,” he said. “All of those are the direct result of the policies you’ve spent your entire lifetime advancing.”
Hawley went even further, suggesting wrongful convictions are just part of a U.S. system based on "the rule of law:
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Morrison he planned to oppose her nomination, along with any other nominees the Biden administration puts forward who are “soft on crime.”
“I will oppose you and anyone else the administration sends to us who do not understand the necessity of the rule of law,” he said.
None of it made sense until you noticed a pattern in the attacks Republicans were making: First, use a judicial nomination to wage a proxy fight against progressive prosecutors, a cohort of left-leaning Democratic district attorneys who have sought reforms to the bail system, curbed enforcement of lower-level marijuana offenses and increased the use of diversion programs over jail time. Second, falsely cast these Democratic district attorneys’ policies as the reason for spikes in crime, and then tie the judicial nominee to those policies and therefore the violence.
After Cruz and Hawley sprayed brain flatulence in all directions, Cotton joined in. From a report at Salon:
Cotton, notorious for his call to set the military on George Floyd protesters, also threw out fighting words during the hearing.
"Are you proud that you encouraged such defiance in convicted murderers?" the Republican senator asked Morrison, whose work has led to the exonerations of at least 30 people who were wrongfully convicted. In one exchange, Cotton challenged Morrison over the execution of Ledell Lee, an Arkansas man who was convicted for the murder of his neighbor in 1993. Back in 2017, Morrison casted strong doubt over Lee's prosecution, which she said overlooked "significant" DNA evidence suggesting that Lee was innocent.
HuffPost's Bendery probably was on target when she wrote . . .
The whole situation — the faux outrage, the claims that Morrison was soft on crime, the claims that Republicans were the ones who were tough on crime — was a ridiculous spectacle, given that Morrison has spent her entire career getting innocent people out of prison.
The GOP attacks perhaps offer a preview of how Republicans on the panel plan to go after Biden’s Supreme Court nominee when she comes before the committee