Legal scholars warn against overinterpreting district court decisions. Tracey E. Georgeprofessor of law at Vanderbilt University, said: “The idea that you can look at these things to determine whether someone is a liberal or a conservative – it just wasn’t my experience.”
Judge Jackson, while serving in the district court, took a particular interest in criminal cases. In 2018 she forcibly rejected an attempt by the government to seize $180,000 from a drug dealer, which prosecutors said was the value of two pounds of heroin seized by police. Prosecutors concluded that dealer Keith J. Young purchased the heroin with money that was used to facilitate the crime and was therefore subject to forfeiture.
“Despite the fact that the government has already confiscated the very drugs that Young allegedly offered $180,000 to purchase,” she wrote, “the government maintains that Young should also be sentenced to confiscate an additional $180,000 as a criminal penalty.” .
This theory, Judge Jackson held, “constitutes an unacceptable double counting and extends the forfeiture doctrine beyond all reasonable limits.”
Next year, The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution places limits on the ability of states and localities to take and hold cash, cars, houses, and other private property used to commit crimes.
Judge Jackson called for the humane treatment of prisoners, decision in favor of a deaf prisoner whom corrections officers kept in what she called “miserable isolation, generally unaware of what was going on around him and unable to communicate effectively with prison authorities, prison doctors, his counselor, his teacher, or his fellow inmates.”
The officers “figuratively shrugged their shoulders and actually sat down with folded hands towards this man with a pronounced hearing disability in custody,” she wrote, “apparently content with their own ignorant convictions about how best to treat him, and, of course, without engaging in any meaningful assessment of his needs.”