Examining Judge Sotomayor's years as a New York state prosecutor

This morning's Washington Post has this interesting article on Judge Sotomayor's early work as a lawyer headlined "Gritty First Job Shaped Nominee; Years as N.Y. Prosecutor Gave Sotomayor Firsthand Look at Crime and Punishment." Here are snippets:

The five years Sotomayor spent in the Manhattan district attorney's office, say several friends and colleagues, shaped her as a criminal prosecutor and helped form her worldview as a judge. The experience, combined with her later years as a trial judge, would make her unique among her new colleagues at the Supreme Court should she be confirmed and would bring a firsthand exposure to the court's consideration of criminal procedure and sentencing.

As a federal judge for 17 years at the district and circuit court levels, Sotomayor has written thousands of opinions, which now are receiving renewed scrutiny. The early examinations tell little about her jurisprudence on capital punishment, because it is rarely imposed in the states covered by the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but so far have shown her as a middle-of-the-road jurist who, like most judges, rules most often in favor of the prosecution.

"She toes the line in terms of following what the law is, and in that respect [her opinions] come out as more pro-government," said Ellen S. Podgor, a law professor at Stetson University who has reviewed about 100 of Sotomayor's appellate rulings in white-collar cases....

Over time, Sotomayor saw that both the victims and the defendants in her cases were coming from poor neighborhoods. "I had more problems during my first year in the office with the low-grade crimes -- the shoplifting, the prostitution, the minor assault cases," she told a writer for the New York Times in 1983. "In large measure, in those cases you were dealing with socioeconomic crimes, crimes that could be the product of the environment and of poverty. Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence."

Prior posts on the SCOTUS nomination and record of Judge Sotomayor:

• Some very early, very brief sentencing reflections on Judge Sotomayor
• A quick thought on Judge Sotomayor's sentencing work in Cavera
• Noting early unpublished sentencing opinions from Judge Sotomayor
• Judge Sotomayor on textualism and voting rights in Hayden v. Pataki
• President Obama to nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court
• Notable background parallels between Judge Sotomayor and Justice Alito
• Any predictions on how a Justice Sotomayor would approach capital cases?
• Examining Judge Sotomayor's criminal justice record