Sometimes, it's just a matter of perspective

In his column, here, Ruben Navarette praises the President for choosing Sonia Sotomayor because of her top-flight academic credentials, her intellect and, yes, her empathy.

In a column he penned a couple of weeks back, Navarette was critical of a jury’s decision of finding the white defendants who had beaten to death a Mexican illegal in Shenandoah, PA. guilty of merely simple assault when the more serious charges of ethnic intimidation and third-degree murder were thrown out.

The jury foreman contended that he thought that some of the people on the jury were indeed racist but another juror took exception to that:

"It was really not as cut and dry as a couple of white kids beat up a Mexican and killed him," Silfies told reporters. "It's not like that. I sat there for a week and heard the testimony and heard the evidence, and I had a lot of doubt that these boys were heinous."

In fact, here’s what Navarette wrote in a follow up to that quote:

A lot of what happens in the court system is all about empathy. The jury might have found it easier to relate to the teenagers sitting at the defendants' table than to an illegal immigrant from Mexico lying in the morgue.

Thank you, Mr. Navarette. In the span of two columns over two weeks, he has illustrated perfectly the sticky mess one can get into when one starts putting a premium on “empathy” as a qualifier in the courtroom. Sure, everything is dandy when “empathy” results in “favorable” outcomes but what happens when “empathy” swerves off the course for which you had intended? What happens when your concept of "empathy" does not necessarily reflect that of someone else? And what happens when “empathy” overrides objectivity? Objectivity, a concept and practice in the courtroom that I’m sure Mr. Navarette would now liked to have seen a little bit more of in the Shenandoah case.

Empathy giveth, Empathy taketh away.