Sotomayor is remembered as a zealous prosecutor (experience made her a "law-and-order judge")

Reporting from New York -- The detectives crouched low, guns in hand, sweeping the crumbling apartments, moving cautiously from room to room, barking at the two prosecutors to stay back, to watch out.

The lawyers were children of the city, raised in ethnic neighborhoods by families of modest means. But the poverty here in central Harlem startled them. Some of the abandoned buildings served as shooting galleries, places where drug addicts congregated. The air was rank, the threat of violence palpable...

Though her critics portray the Supreme Court nominee as a liberal activist, her colleagues and legal opponents in the early 1980s draw a picture of her as a zealous prosecutor whose experiences combating crime have made her, according to experts who have studied her legal decisions, something of a law-and-order judge, especially when it comes to police searches and the use of evidence.


In two major rulings after she joined the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in 1998, she held that evidence could be used to convict a defendant even though police had violated his rights in seizing it. Sotomayor said that because the police and prosecutors acted "in good faith," the evidence need not be thrown out.

In 1999, Sotomayor upheld the crack cocaine conviction of a New York man despite what she called a "mistaken arrest." Last year, Sotomayor spoke for a 2-1 majority that upheld a man's child pornography conviction, even though she agreed an FBI agent did not have probable cause to search his computer.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-sotomayor-prosecutor9-2009jun09,0,7206855.story

...and the problem with "common sense" is that it's subjective.


Her nomination is purely political and I think it's going to bite us in the ass.

But I was speaking of her as a Judge.

I hope she's still against it.