Kavanaugh Is Happy to Let Black and Brown Kids Die in Prison
The Supreme Court voted that children can be locked away for life over youthful mistakes. Just don’t mention Kavanaugh’s own teen sex-assault allegations.
A mere three years ago, Brett Kavanaugh had a full-on meltdown while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations that he committed sexual assault in high school at the age of 17. Red-faced and sneering, overflowing with both indignation and entitled frat-boy rage, Kavanaugh denounced the proceedings, denying the charges—but also suggesting the sentient keg-stand he’d been in high school didn’t define who he’d grown up to become all these decades later.
“If we want to sit here and talk about whether a Supreme Court nomination should be based on a high school yearbook page,” the SCOTUS candidate said at the time, “I think that’s taken us to a new level of absurdity.”
Of course, the “Rich White Boys Will Be Rich White Boys” defense only works for rich white boys. Kavanaugh made that yet more clear last week in authoring the Jones v. Mississippi majority opinion, which bucks previous SCOTUS decisions which established less punitive sentencing rules for juvenile defendants. In a 6-3 vote, Kavanaugh and his fellow conservatives undid all that more humane precedent, essentially ruling that judges can sentence kids—including those younger than Kavanaugh was when he allegedly committed sexual assault without repercussion—to die in jail for crimes they engaged in as minors. This new ruling is guaranteed to harm an unknowable number of young people who become entangled in the criminal legal system. But it will undoubtedly have the most disastrous impact on Black and brown children, who already get screwed over by a system incapable of seeing them as kids.