Judge: Ashcroft Distorted Record

WASHINGTON (AP) â€” A black Missouri judge said Thursday that John Ashcroft ``seriously distorted my record'' to block the judge's appointment to a federal court in what Senate Democrats claimed

Thursday, January 18th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) â€” A black Missouri judge said Thursday that John Ashcroft ``seriously distorted my record'' to block the judge's appointment to a federal court in what Senate Democrats claimed was a bid for political gain.

``The question for the Senate is whether these misrepresentations are consistent with the fair play and justice you all would require of the U.S. attorney general,'' Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Now President Bush's choice for attorney general, Ashcroft was a Missouri senator seeking re-election when he engineered the party-line 1999 defeat of the federal nomination for White, the first black judge on Missouri's highest court. That vote, the first defeat of a district court nomination on the Senate floor in 40 years, has become a focus of Democrats and civil rights groups opposed to Ashcroft's confirmation.

Republicans argued that Ashcroft had based his objections on legal disagreements with White, not politics or race.

Ashcroft goes before Judiciary Committee
AP/Rick Bowmer [17K]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the third day of the hearings, which seem likely to lead to Ashcroft's confirmation, Democrats and Republicans called character witnesses and representatives from women's, civil rights, law enforcement and crime victims' groups.

With no sign of a break in Republican support for Ashcroft and one Democrat, Georgia's Zell Miller, committed to voting for him, opponents raised the possibility of a filibuster.

Ashcroft's sharpest critic, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was considering that longshot move, which would force Ashcroft's backers to get 60 votes in the evenly divided Senate to put him in charge of the Justice Department.

Meantime, the White episode filled the old Senate Caucus Room with drama as the jurist recounted his rise from poverty and then a former prosecutor graphically described a quadruple murder that led to one of White's most controversial opinions. Setting aside heated clashes of previous days, senators stepped gingerly among the emotions on display.

Ashcroft on Roe v. Wade
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The child of teen-age parents, White described growing up in segregated St. Louis in an unfinished basement with no bathroom or kitchen. He was bused to a school where white children ``would throw milk and food at us and tell us to go back to where we came from.''

``This racism only strengthened my determination. I was not going to let the color of my skin or ignorance or the hatefulness of others hold me back,'' he said.

Some civil rights groups accuse Ashcroft of racism. Democrats who served on the committee with Ashcroft have all denied he's a racist, though Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and others have called him racially insensitive.

Instead, most Democrats seemed to back the view of Kennedy, who told White that Ashcroft ``tried to use your record on death penalty cases to help win his hotly contested Senate seat in Missouri against Governor (Mel) Carnahan.''

Ashcroft repeatedly attacked Carnahan's commuting, at Pope John Paul II's request, of a death sentence. But Ashcroft was defeated even though Carnahan died in a plane crash shortly before the election. Carnahan's widow now holds the seat.

White said he was ``surprised to hear that he (Ashcroft) had gone to the Senate floor and called me `pro-criminal' with a `tremendous bent toward criminal activity,'''

White testified that as a judge, he had voted to uphold the death penalty in 41 of 59 cases. In 53 of the cases, White said, he voted with the majority of his colleagues on the court, most of whom were appointed by former Gov. Ashcroft. White was the lone dissenter three times, he said.

Committee Republicans, all of whom voted against White on the floor although he had twice been approved in the committee, lavished praise on the jurist for his career.

However, some echoed Ashcroft's earlier critique of White's opinion backing a new trial for a quadruple murderer on death row. White had said the murderer had incompetent defense counsel; Ashcroft said Wednesday incompetence did not meet the Supreme Court's standard for ordering a new trial.

Most Republican senators strained to separate White's testimony from Ashcroft's confirmation.

``His language was intemperate,'' Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said of Ashcroft. But Specter noted that White himself ``does not say John Ashcroft should not be confirmed and he does not say that John Ashcroft acted out of a political motive or out of a biased motive.''

Republicans summoned Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo., who had prosecuted the quadruple murder case. Hulshof brought along Sheriff Kenny Jones, whose wife was one of the victims. The ex-prosecutor graphically described how James Johnson had shot Jones' wife in front of her family, one sheriff's deputy in the back and two other lawmen from ambush.

Hulshof called Johnson's three lawyers ``a dream team,'' who brought in three nationally known experts on the insanity defense they mounted.

All the Democrats expressed sympathy for Jones and took pains to point out that White did not want to free Johnson, just grant him a new trial.

In other testimony, Planned Parenthood Federation president Gloria Feldt questioned whether Ashcroft would continue Justice Department efforts that helped cut violence against abortion clinics in half. She said that Ashcroft, while governor, never spoke out on clinic violence even after a Missouri clinic was firebombed.

Jerry Hunter, a black who was Ashcroft's labor secretary in Missouri, testified his former boss tried to recruit blacks for state jobs.

Outside the hearings, singer-director Barbra Streisand personally called 15 senators urging Ashcroft's rejection, according to her publicist Dick Guttman.