Sotamayor, Not So Empathetic After All, Sticks to the Letter of Bourgeios Law

As is well known, President Obama has said that one of the qualities, among many, he would like in his supreme court nominees is that of "empathy". And of course the mainstream idiot-right that so dominates American political discourse seized upon this one word to criticize Obama and his nominee Sotamayor. They have of course also seized upon the words of a speech by Sotamayor, saying that the "rich experiences of a wise Latina woman" might lead a judge to make better decisions than a white-male judge. Never mind that much of the noise by the idiot-right is without substance.

On the other hand, their has been some substantive talk about Sotomayor and her judicial record. Republican Senator John Kyle would at least seem to be a little more reasonable, but of course within the boundaries of Bourgeois Democracy. From CBS News:

Kyl on the other hand said she will definitely have to assure members
of the Judiciary Committee that she will live by the oath of the Supreme Court.

The Republican Senator took out a piece of paper and read the oath which reads, "'I will administer justice without respect to persons and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.'"

Kyl said that oath means that she will have "not bring in her empathy for the poor person, for example. If the law is on the side of the rich person, then she has to rule
in favor of the rich person. If she will do that, then I think she'll have no trouble in her confirmation hearing."

I don't think law makers such as Kyle, whether Democrats or Republicans, who make laws that favor the rich and corporate interests in the first place have anything to worry about.

Former attorney and famous Salon.com blogger Glen Greenwald has written about the idiot-right's silly noise about the Sotomayor nomination, and he has also brought to light facts about Sotomayor's actual judicial record. I highly recommend these articles.

As it so happens, Greenwald was actually the attorney for a plaintiff that lost a race and age discrimination lawsuit against a hospital. I have copied and pasted the parts I want to emphasize here below, and I snipped a bunch, so do read the original if interested.

Thursday May 28, 2009 07:29 EDT A Revealing Anecdote About Sonia Sotomayor

(snipped intro)

My writing about this issue from the start has not been based on my
view that Sotomayor is the best choice for the Court. There is still too
much unknown about her to reach a conclusion in that regard (though see this
encouraging snippet of her at Oral Argument in a critical case). My
interest has been due to the fact that the smears against her were both totally
unrecognizable, driven by very ugly sentiments and enabled by reckless
"reporting" methods. Along those lines, I want to recount the facts behind
a case I had before Judge Sotomayor because it helps to demonstrate just how
false and baseless are the attacks thus far against her:

That case, Norville v. Staten Island University Hospital, involved one
of the most sympathetic plaintiffs I had in my legal career. The
plaintiff, Wendy Norville, was a black woman who grew up in poverty in the
Caribbean, moved to the U.S., and put herself through nursing school while
working as a maid and raising her children as a single mother. After
graduating at the age of 44, she went to work at SIU hospital as an R.N. in the
neurology unit, where, for the next 12 years, she compiled an exemplary record
of uniformly excellent performance reviews.

During her 13th year as an R.N., while working in the neurology
unit, a very tall male patient had a seizure while lying on a table.
Norville attempted to restrain the patient to prevent him from injuring himself
or falling on the floor, and when doing so, she sustained a very severe back
injury. She was unable to work for a full year, but after extensive
rehabilitation, she told the hospital she wanted to return to work, but her
back injury imposed some mild physical restrictions -- such as limitations on
her ability to lift heavy objects -- and she requested that they find a nursing
position for her where heavy lifting was not required.

The hospital claimed that the only positions they could offer her
were ones that were part-time or would require her to lose all of her union
seniority and benefits, and after a couple of months of pretending to search
more, the hospital notified her that there were no comparable positions for her
and they thus fired her. Because she was 56 years old and disabled by
then, she was unable to get hired by another hospital. So after working
for 12 years as an R.N., she was left fired and unemployed -- all because of an
injury she sustained on the job, while helping a patient. She then
sued the hospital (which was large and fully insured) for failing to
accommodate her disability under the ADA and for race and age
discrimination (they had accommodated white nurses far more injured than
she and also rejected her for the one open nursing position in favor of a much
younger nurse).

If ever there was a case where one's "emotions" for "the
downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless" would be strong, it was this
one. This was a poor, black and highly admirable woman who -- through
no fault of her own -- was left jobless and impoverished at the age of 56, suing
a large and fully insured corporation. And her case was not only
emotionally compelling, but legally strong as well: the federal judge
presiding over the case from the start refused to dismiss any of her claims at
the close of discovery, holding that there was ample evidence to support all of
her claims and to enable a jury to decide in her favor.

Right before her trial was to begin, that judge got caught up in a
massive criminal trial, and as a result, a federal judge from Louisiana was
shipped to New York to preside over the trial. This visiting judge hated
the case and the plaintiff from the start. At trial, he excluded most of
her best evidence showing discrimination, then dismissed her race and age
discrimination claims before they even got to the jury, and then -- on her sole
remaining claim for violations of the ADA -- gave the jury patently
unfavorable and inaccurate instructions about the law that caused the jury to
decide against her.

That was the state of the case as it was appealed to a three-judge
panel of the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor was by far the most active
questioner at Oral Argument and it was she who wrote the opinion for the unanimous appellate court. Without a trace of sympathy or even interest in the plight of the plaintiff, Sotomayor methodically recounted the evidence of discrimination and, in as cold and legalistic a manner as possible, concluded that Norville "produced insufficient evidence at trial to show that the hospital"
discriminated against her. She thus affirmed the trial judge's
dismissal of Norville's claims of race and age discrimination.

So there you have it, evidence that Sotomayor isn't that empathetic at all. "In a cold and legalistic manner" she sided with the wealthy owners of the hospital and insurance companies. And that is how the system is set up, defend the interests of the wealthy, and dispose of people no longer useful to the profits-first capitalist system.