You already know Sen. Tom Cotton suggested falsely that newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was soft on terrorists, child molesters and Nazis.

You know that he misused the name of former Justice Robert Jackson to make a historically illiterate and un-American point that somehow criminal defendants aren’t entitled to lawyers. He blamed Joe Biden for a sentencing reform law pushed by Donald Trump.

Advertisement

But I missed this fine point: He accused the Supreme Court appointee, based on an inaccurate court record, of representing a defendant she didn’t represent.

Above the Law’s Joe Patrice explains this Cotton caper.

Advertisement

Could legal tech have saved Tom Cotton from embarrassing himself?

Well… no. Tom Cotton approached the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation process deeply committed to showing his whole ass. So merely repairing one embarrassing error on his part would only ensure that he’d stumble into a different one.

But the latest in legal technology offered Cotton an opportunity to avoid one specific blunder. So there’s that!

Cotton asked Jackson about a Guantanamo detainee, al Sawam. She had acknowledged representing detainees as a public defender before moving to a private law firm.

Brown Jackson: “I don’t know what happened to Mr. al Sawam.”
Cotton: “You were listed as counsel for two years during your time at Morrison & Foerster.”
Brown Jackson: “What happens is when you leave from any place, firms or government service, um, you have to let the Court know. Or, their records, their records reflect where you are in the system, and not so much the case in terms of your address.”

Advertisement

Patrice picks up the story.

Judge Jackson is being generous here because in reality you can tell the court all you want and their records might still be broken. That’s just the superior level of service you expect from the government’s $2 billion PACER database!

PACER is often a mess of vestigial data getting updated in one place and ignored in another. In this case, it appears Judge Jackson left the public defender’s office and PACER just left her on there. And when she updated her contact information to her new firm email, the system just plugged that into the old entry rather than remove her from the case.

There is, Patrice noted, software, Lex Machina, that can detect such changes in the federal records.

Advertisement

Not that it really matters to Cotton, who had his sense of shame surgically removed years ago.

 

 

Advertisement