Sotomayor on the issues

Sotomayor on the issues

Sonia Sotomayor’s rulings and writings on some issues in which she has refused to spell out her views during questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

ABORTION

She has not ruled in any cases that squarely confronted the right to abortion. As an appeals court judge she dismissed a challenge to the so-called global gag rule that denied federal funding to international organizations that provide or promote abortions. But in her opinion she used the phrases “anti-abortion” and “pro-choice,” typically used by the abortion rights side.

GUNS

Sotomayor was one of three judges who upheld a New York state law banning possession of “chuka sticks,” a martial arts weapon, against a challenge that contended the law was a violation of the Second Amendment. At issue was whether last year’s Supreme Court decision recognizing an individual’s constitutional right to own guns for self-defense should apply to state laws. The appeals panel said last year’s case left that question unanswered and that it was bound by an 1886 Supreme Court ruling. The judges said they would leave “to the Supreme Court the prerogative of overturning its own decisions.”

ANTI-TERRORISM LAWS

Sotomayor joined an appeals court ruling that struck down parts of the anti-terror USA Patriot Act that prohibited Internet service providers from telling customers when the government asks for private information about them. But she also dismissed complaints of commuters about random searches, instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, aimed at stopping terrorists on a ferry 300 miles north of New York City.

DEATH PENALTY

In 1981, Sotomayor signed a memo as a director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund urging the group to oppose the reinstitution of the death penalty in New York because it was “associated with evident racism in our society.” In 1998, as a federal trial judge, Sotomayor was assigned the first federal death penalty case in New York in many years. She rejected the defendants’ statistical argument against the law, that minorities were disproportionately sentenced to death, agreeing with prosecutors that the numbers by themselves were insufficient. Sotomayor was made an appeals court judge without ruling on the larger challenge to the federal death penalty law.