People’s Weekly World
May 30 2009

COMMENTARY
Psychopaths wanted for high court appointment

Author: Emile Schepers
People’s Weekly World Newspaper, 05/30/09 15:20

Wow, is Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s first nominee to the
Supreme Court, ever in for it!

Mark Kirkorian of the anti-immigrant `Center for Immigration Studies’
told the press this week that it is incorrect to pronounce her name
SotomayOR with the accent on the last syllable as she and anybody who
knows a smidgeon of Spanish pronounces it, but that the name should be
pronounced `SotoMAYur," with the accent on the second to last
syllable. Why? Because this is America, and people should Americanize
the pronunciation of their foreign names if they want to stay here. We
have reliable information that Kirkorian, for example, pronounces his
typically Armenian name as `Chumley’.

This is the tip of the iceberg of the racist and sexist attacks and
insults to which Ms. SotomaYOR is being subjected as her confirmation
proceeds. Worse than refusing to patriotically mispronounce her own
name, she confesses to being influenced by her environment. And
horrible to relate, President Obama has said he was looking for judges
who exhibit `empathy."

The Republican right ran to their dictionaries to look up `empathy’
and found that it means `ability to understand the feelings of
others," or some such commie claptrap. So of course, they’re `agin”
it. `Empathy’ has no place on the Supreme Court.

Well, I did some research and found out that by definition, a person
without empathy is a `psychopath." Yes, psychiatrists define
psychopaths as people who are unable to exhibit `empathy or remorse."
So if the right wants people without empathy on the Supreme Court,
what they are really looking for are psychopaths in black robes.

I think this is perfectly reasonable. After all, psychopaths have had
distinguished careers in both the executive and legislative branches,
so why not in the judiciary also? Having an all-psychopath, no-empathy
bench would solve several current legal dilemmas like the argument
over whether people who are actually innocent should be executed
because their incompetent legal counsel did not file appeal papers on
time (I kid you not, this is actually being discussed).

But there is another problem. Judge Sotomayor is quoted as having
suggested in a 2001 speech that the environment in which she and other
judges grew up might have a positive influence on their ability to
understand their duties. Of course, Ms. Sotomayor grew up as a
working-class daughter of Puerto Rican parents, and was not born with
a silver spoon in her mouth.

Most people who read her whole 2001 statement conclude that it’s just
common sense. Judges like anybody else are influenced by their life
experiences, and this is bound to be reflected in some of their
rulings.

It is also ridiculous and offensive to claim that a Puerto Rican woman
from a working class background would be negatively affected, as a
judge, by her life experiences, but a white male from an elite
background would only be positively impacted by his own life
experiences. It is tantamount to saying that only rich white men are
eligible to do the judging.

As a friend said `anybody who believes this nonsense must be living on
another planet."

So maybe that is the solution to the dilemma of judges being
influenced by their life experiences: Find Supreme Court candidates
from other worlds beyond our solar system. They would have been
influenced, perhaps, by their experiences growing up on their own
planets, but not by the human situations which the form the context of
the cases on which they are supposed to rule, which is what we are
trying to avoid here.

Of course, being brought in from outer space would mean that they are
not U.S. citizens and therefore ineligible for judicial
appointments. But that can be solved as it was for media mogul Rupert
Murdoch, who suddenly was made a U.S. citizen, butting ahead in line
in front of several tens of millions of people so he could own TV and
radio stations here.

So how’s that for a plan? Psychopathic space cadets for the Supreme
Court!

The Republican right should be very pleased with that, as they would
have plenty of candidates for future openings, including a former vice
president.

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