particular sentence. and a particular crime. and the probation office s report, when a court sentences actually in most cases becomes the findings of fact of the court. so the probation office appears just like the prosecution and the defense, the probation office has written a report and they make a recommendation to the court based on their independent analysis related to the facts of a particular crime and defendant and sentence. understood. they give the court counsel. understood. however, they don t issue guidelines. they re not uniform. it is by its very nature a case by case inquiry. as up. the case goes to the judge. as i understand it, the probation reports are not public in all the cases that we re talking about here. i would love to see them if they
0 first of two long and intense days of questioning from members of the senate judiciary committee began this morning with democrats using their questions to allow jackson to issue a rebuttal to republican accusations that she has been soft on crime and republicans pressing her on her record as a judge and public defender and bringing up a whole host of conservative hobby horses. things like critical race theory. jackson has tried to stay above the fray in her responses. early on in the hearing, she told democratic senator, dick durbin, quote, i tried to stay in my lane. along with me are claire mccaskill and msnbc political analyst with danielle holly walker, dean and professor at howard school of law and joyce vance, law professor at university of alabama as well as an msnbc legal analyst. we have a few minutes before we go back to the hearing. claire, i want to start with you. just some of the fireworks that happened earlier today. just in the last hour or so. senator ted cruz arriv
0 facts, i m applying the law in as neutral and consistent a manner as i can. because that is the duty and requirement of the judicial oath. i m also very conscious of the limits of judicial authority, of the restrictions that exist in the law to prevent me as a judge from becoming a policymaker. this means that i carefully scrutinize my jurisdiction. it means that i look at the text and focus on the text and the intentions of the legislatures that drafted that provision. or the intention of the framers that put forward that constitutional principle. it means i m looking at precedent if i was fortunate enough to be confirmed to the supreme court, i would be upholding the principles as i consider the precedents, and making sure that the court is putting forward consistent and predictable rulings. you re watching msnbc s live coverage of the confirmation hearing of judge ketanji brown jackson. this is ari melber. we ll continue our live coverage here on the beat. soon we ll be joined
check would be forthcoming soon. and sure enough, it was, on valentine s day, 2017. we have our top legal experts here. chuck rosenberg and joyce vance are former u.s. attorneys and msnbc contributors. thank you for joining us here. chuck, let me start with you. what s your reaction to the journal s reporting on michael cohen and specifically the piece if he could not get a pardon, he might cooperate with probation reports. how do you read that? defendants are always looking for a way out. once they re caught or are in trouble, there s a couple paths to redemption or at least to lessening the impact, whatever they did wrong. a pardon is one, but that s extraordinarily rare. very few people get them. even fewer people have a personal connection to a president in order to ask for one. if cohen s attorney asked for one, well, i guess that shock me. the typical path to redejs mpti is cooperating. that s how most defendants work
i ll go over a couple conditions with you. i ll be honest with you. i ve gone through your whole thing, and it doesn t look very good, okay? i m just really scared right now. okay. i don t want to screw up no more. you ve had a lot of failures to appear. this positive test doesn t help. now you say you have a ticket for possession of marijuana. it s not looking good for you, to be very honest. you cast keep doing what you re doing, at 23 years of age. i don t want to go to prison. i realize that more and more every day. you have to complete your whole no, i know. once that s done, i m pretty much done with formal. not give us any more negatives on drug tests. and i want to see you get a good job. and anger management. i ve looked at your past probation reports, your juvenile. you have a history of fighting, doing holes into the walls. you have a history of having