Sen. Tom Cotton announced legislation Tuesday to bar judges from using a convict’s gender identity or transition status to deliver watered-down prison sentences.
“Criminals are criminals. Radical left judges shouldn’t be able to use ’gender confusion’ as a reason to assign shorter sentences,” the Arkansas Republican said. “My bill will keep Americans safer by ensuring all criminals are properly sentenced.”
He announced the legislation after a federal judge issued a relatively weak 8-year sentence to the person convicted of attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
At the time, Nicholas Roske, the person who now goes by Sophie Roske and laid part of the blame for the failed attempt on the justice’s life on an ongoing struggle with gender identity.
Sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of 30 years to life. The Justice Department had sought at least 30 years in the case.
But Judge Deborah Boardman, a Biden appointee to the court in Maryland, sided with Roske’s request for an eight-year sentence.
The judge said she thought Roske wasn’t actually that close to killing Justice Kavanaugh. She also said she would “take into consideration” that Roske “is a transgender woman and will be sent to a male-only” prison under Trump administration rules on housing biological male prisoners in men’s facilities.
Some lawmakers have called for Judge Boardman to be impeached for the sentence, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who would oversee impeachment in the House, said that is “on the table.”
Judges have wide latitude in most sentencing decisions, after a Supreme Court ruling in 2004 ruled that the federal sentencing guidelines could not be mandatory. Unless Congress has laid out a specific mandatory sentence for a particular crime, judges can impose their own decisions.
Judges in the past have considered illegal immigration status when they decide sentencing.
At the state level, judges have worked with prosecutors to cut sentences below the level where they could trigger scrutiny and potential deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And at the federal level, judges have been asked to cut illegal immigrants a break at the end of their sentences, reasoning that since they will be deported and can’t qualify for time at a halfway house, they should get an earlier release than a citizen would get.
