“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in several speeches she gave in 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2004, according to CNN.[ Sotomayor's 'wise Latina' comment a staple of her speeches, June 8, 2009]
Since Monday, the MSM has been celebrating Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—searching Google News on her name brings up one valentine after another:
What’s this all about?
In a Texas federal drug trial in 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Ponder had asked black defendant Bongani Charles Calhoun on the stand of a situation in which he had found himself,
“You've got African-Americans, you've got Hispanics, you've got a bag full of money. Does that tell you - a light bulb doesn't go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?”
The blacks in the hotel room had been Calhoun’s accomplices. They thought the Hispanics were going to sell them drugs. But the Hispanics were DEA agents. The bag of money came from Calhoun and his black accomplices.
Calhoun claimed to have no knowledge of any drug deal. Of course, he was lying and was duly convicted.
No one saw anything wrong with Ponder’s conduct at the time. And nothing was wrong.
You could say the DEA engaged in “racial profiling”—by having exclusively Hispanic agents play drug dealers. But no one has attacked the agency (yet). Had a racially mixed group of white and Hispanic agents posed as dealers, the buy-and-bust operation would have been a failure because… life is not like that. It would have been a giveaway that the deal was a law enforcement sting.
Indeed, Bongani Charles Calhoun and his crime partners were themselves guilty of racial profiling—that’s why they accepted the Hispanic agents
A VDARE.com reader sent a comment from The Hill
“random minorities with a supposed bag full of money and the guy can't make a reasonable inference? they most likely were not going to buy real estate or deposit it with their stockbroker.” Sotomayor reprimands federal prosecutor for racial remark, By Sam Baker, February 25, 2013.
Eventually, Calhoun and/ or his lawyers sought to convert Ponder’s reality-based question into a racist affront. But by then it was too late to appeal on that basis, and the Supreme Court rejected the argument.
Although Sotomayor acknowledged, the appeal was dead, she attached a statement to the decision, saying the question “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation,” and was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence.” [BONGANI CHARLES CALHOUN v. UNITED STATES (PDF) , U.S. Supreme Court, February 25, 2013.]
Ponder had done no such thing. He had asked a perfectly reasonable question of the defendant, regarding the latter’s state of mind, which would have been formed by valid empirical generalizations which are called, among other things, “stereotypes.”
Some of the earliest valentines were reportorials that seemed to follow the lead of Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday condemned racially charged language used by a federal prosecutor in Texas.
[U.S. justice denounces prosecutor's racially charged question by Lawrence Hurley, Reuters, February 25, 2013. (N.S.: The original title used “laments,” rather than “denounces”)]
I say “seeming to follow” Hurley’s lead, as many of the posts appeared so quickly on the same morning in what looks like an orchestrated campaign.
AOL/HP posted Hurley’s Reuters reportorial at 11:31 a.m.; three minutes later, it posted pro-criminal glibertarian Radley Balko’s valentine/poison pen letter. (See below.)
Similar vituperative post came that same day from bloggers at heavily trafficked Leftist sites like AOL’s Huffington Post and The Atlantic.
Doubly disturbing was the way the sites’ thread nannies crushed dissent, seeking to suggest that everyone agreed with the lynch mob. For over one hour after Hurley’s reportorial was up at AOL/HP, at midday, the censors refused to post any comments, and asserted that only nine were “pending.”
Due to its millions of customers (including yours truly), AOL/HP will routinely get 500-1,000 comments in one hour, even for articles on boring topics like tax laws.
Similarly, for three days after David Wagner’s lynch mob polemic went up at The Atlantic, only four comments have been permitted, despite 3,404 official views.
Wagner wrote:
“A United States prosecutor who tried to win a drug case by invoking racial prejudices received a lesson on Constitutional law from Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor today. Her lucid statement highlights the importance of equal protection under the law.
“The Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal for the case in question, but something the prosecutor said in an earlier trial offended Sotomayor so much that she had to speak out about it.”
[The Importance of Sonia Sotomayor Being Honest with This Racist Prosecutor by David Wagner, The Atlantic, February 25, 2013.]
Wagner applauds Sotomayor’s ludicrous claim that any common sense reference to race violates the defendant’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection provisions.
In a paroxysm of political correctness, glibertarian Radley Balko sought to trump all of his fellow vituperators.
“This struck Sotomayor as a wholly inappropriate thing for an Assistant U.S. Attorney to even be thinking, let alone blurting out in open court, in front of a jury. And rightly so.”
[Shaming Bad Prosecutors by Radley Balko, Huffington Post, February 25, 2013, 11:34 a.m. EST; updated February 25, 2013, 2:15 p.m. EST. My emphasis.]
So white male prosecutors must not only be careful to prevent any reality-based racial reference from passing their lips; they must inoculate themselves against even thinking in terms of reality!
But if that were so, there would be no reason for the prosecution or, indeed the sting, in the first place. All were based on reality.
And that, for Sotomayor, Balko, et al., is the point. No reality, no sting; no sting, no prosecution; no prosecution, no conviction. They are retaliating against Sam Ponder for doing his job. They seek to get the conviction overturned, by hook or by crook (Presidential pardon?)
Sotomayor asserted that Ponder had made “arguments calculated to appeal to the prejudices of the jury.” But in fact his arguments were calculated to appeal to common sense.
Sotomayor was firing a shot across the bow of all aggressive white male prosecutors, warning them to try black and Hispanic defendants with both hands tied behind their backs—the way John McCain campaigned against Barack Obama.
The “wise Latina woman” seeks to make it impossible for white men, who lack her pro-black/Hispanic-criminal credentials, to serve effectively as prosecutors.
I believe that the case that inspired Sotomayor to destroy Sam Ponder was that of James Konat in 2011.
For 22 years, Jim Konat was the top prosecutor in the King County (Seattle) DA’s office. Konat’s competence, whiteness, and maleness proved intolerable to the Washington Supreme Court, a predominantly white body so supportive of racist black murderers that in 2003 it overturned hundreds of murder convictions in a controversial decision that appeared to demand that murder convictions require incontrovertible evidence of an intent to kill. This resulted in sweetheart plea deals and much diminished sentences.
In 2007, Konat had brought in a verdict of guilty for first-degree murder and first-degree assault against black Kevin L. Monday Jr. However, the WSC threw out Monday’s conviction, using as a pretext its perverse assertion that Konat’s having spoken truthfully to the jury about blacks’ refusal to testify against black cut-throats (“The code is, black folk don't testify against black folk”), was somehow “racist.” The WSC went so far as to lie and deny the existence of “the code.”(“An alleged African American anti snitch code” for which they could “find no support or justification.”) See the decision State of Washington v. Monday PDF and the dissent (PDF).
King County DA James Satterberg initially defended Konat, but soon folded like a cheap suitcase. Konat’s career destroyed, he used up several months of back vacation and personal time, and in February, 2012, resigned.
Ponder’s prosecutorial career is now as dead as Konat’s.
But none of Sonia Sotomayor’s behavior should surprise anyone. While showing a complete lack of intellectual talent or character, her entire adult life has been based on ethnic and sexual privilege.
As even the New York Times acknowledged in 2009, Sotomayor had never hidden her views. She was so viciously anti-white that she ruled in an unsigned, summary judgment against the firemen in the Ricci affirmative action case, which became a scandal, and was overturned by the Supreme Court.
As someone who has spent her entire adult life bellicosely making everything about race, Sotomayor is the last person on earth to be attacking anyone else for “racism.” The Sotomayor quote with which I opened this article was a perfect statement of her unfitness to be an officer of any court (prosecutor, defender, or judge).
And yet, Sen. Lindsay “Gramnesty” Graham (Treason-NC) and other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were pussycats, when she was nominated for the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor has always benefited from the support of powerful whites—whether her first employer, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, Sen. Graham, or leftwing SC justice Stephen Breyer, who signed onto her newest vituperation.
It would have been shocking, had Sotomayor not abused her newfound power.
And what did the GOP say about her latest outrage? At Brain-Dead Central, there was nothing but crickets chirping.
I guess they don’t want to offend their non-existent Hispanic base.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
