Leave it to the Washington Post to find kiddie-porn convicts and portray them sympathetically.
But the Post added a special touch in its story about kiddie-porn aficionado Welsey Hawkins. It importuned the registered sex-offender to say he’s sorry for the harsh questions about him that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson received from Republican senators during her confirmation hearings.
As with many of her sentences in child-porn cases, Jackson ignored the request of prosecutors for a long jail term and sentenced Hawkins to a much lesser one. So of course, the natural thing for the leftist Post to do was seek the pervert’s opinion about it.
YouTube Porn
To its credit, before finding Hawkins, the Post published a piece about his crime.
The confessed homosexual uploaded child porn to YouTube in 2012 when he was 18 years old, and “an undercover detective soon emailed him, suggesting the two had ‘similar interests,’” the Post reported:
Hawkins emailed the agent two videos, and wrote that he was interested in boys ages 11 to 17. Authorities executed a search warrant in June, finding 17 videos and 16 images of boys on a laptop and a phone.
Hawkins cooperated with the investigation, federal prosecutors said. In court filings, they wrote that the recent high school graduate had agreed to be interviewed by detectives, admitted possession, entered a pre-indictment guilty plea and took “full responsibility for his actions.”
Although federal guidelines called for a sentence of eight to 10 years, prosecutors said that given Hawkins’s age and lack of criminal record they recommended two years. According to documents given to senators, a U.S. probation officer recommended a year and a half.
His defense attorney blamed Hawkins’ “sexual identity issue complicated by his mother’s strict religious beliefs and that his offense was prompted by a teenage sexual drive, not an intrinsic sexual attraction to significantly younger children.”
Jackson, then a federal district court judge, sentenced him to three months in prison and three months probation.
Here’s the reason, the Post reported:
Addressing Hawkins, she said, “you were only involved in this for a few months” and that “other than your engagement with the undercover officer, there isn’t an indication that you were in any online communities to advance your collecting behavior.”
Jackson added that the age difference between Hawkins and the victims in the videos wasn’t all that great. One was eight years old.
In 2019, the Post reported, Jackson sent Hawkins to a halfway house after his probation officer told Jackson that “despite being in treatment for more than five years [Hawkins] continues to seek out sexually arousing, non-pornographic material and images of males 13 to 16-years-old.”
Sympathy for the Judge
In the piece that ensued, Hawkins confessed that what he did was a “bit monstrous.”
But the Post couldn’t stop there. It tossed in a chance for Hawkins to bash the Republicans who attack Jackson’s record on perverts.
“Of the attention his case is getting now, Hawkins noted that many in the GOP continued to support candidates who faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the Post reported:
“While I’m not defending my actions, because, again, they are undefendable, I feel that their hypocrisy should be pointed out.”
Perhaps most surprising, Hawkins said, was that he found himself feeling sympathy for the judge he had once been angry with for sending him to prison.
“I wasn’t very happy that she gave me three months, though, after reflection when I was in jail, I was hearing from other people who said it was their first time arrested and they got five years, six years.
“I feel that she chose to take into consideration the fact that I was just getting started [in life] and she knew this was going to hold me back for years to come regardless,” he said, “so she didn’t really want to add on to that.”
GOP senators presented Jackson’s record of sending child porn in some detail, and Senators Josh Hawley noted that her sympathy for perverts includes criticizing sex-offender registries.
“As far back as her time in law school, Judge Jackson has questioned making convicts register as sex offenders — saying it leads to ‘stigmatization and ostracism.’” he tweeted. “She’s suggested public policy is driven by a “climate of fear, hatred & revenge” against sex offenders.”
Jackson has proposed eliminating mandatory-minimum sentences for child-porn convicts, and once said that people who possess the material “are in this for either the collection, or the people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community.”
H/T: Breitbart
