Sotomayor Says Capital Punishment is Racist

It appears that Sonia Sotomayor left out a potentially controversial memo from her official response to the Senate questionnaire for her confirmation hearing.

Written while she was working for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund (can you imagine the uproar from the lefties if Scalia had belonged to the Sicilian Legal Defense Fund?), Sotomayor’s 1981 memo called the death penalty “racist” and a violation of the present “humanist” society.

The memo held that crime was too “complex” to expect capital punishment to be effective as a deterrent. However, the same memo did not find it too complex to draw a straight line between the racial proportion of people executed and overt racism. A little bit selective reasoning, if you ask me.

The memo also held that in the two years prior to the memo, nothing could be found in any publication that challenged the opposition to the death penalty. I am quite sure they did not look very hard, and probably ignored the writings of Frank Carrington.