Kavanaugh hearings put confirmation process on trial -- and the verdict is guilty
SAN DIEGO -- I'll just say it: I believe both of them.
In this climate, I'll get hammered by loyal partisans on both the right and the left for reaching such a conclusion. But I don't care.
We're living at a time when a lot of people can decide whether testimony is believable even before hearing it. Don't confuse us with facts, we're too busy formulating an opinion.
But the truth is tricky. You might think there is only one version. You'd be wrong. The mind is a mysterious thing with the power to convince us something happened or didn't happen.
Think of all the people who sit in jail right now, wrongly convicted and hoping to one day be exonerated by DNA evidence. Many of them are locked up because of one of the most unreliable forms of evidence: eyewitness testimony. You have all these people doing their civic duty who, it turns out, were 100 percent certain of identifications that were false.
Thirty years ago, I spent a semester back home in Fresno County working as a law clerk at the Public Defender's Office. I spent the next semester seeing things from the other side of the table by working at the District Attorney's Office.
One thing I learned: The criminal justice system is terribly imperfect, just like the human beings who created it. Mistakes are made every single day. Guilty people sometimes go free, while innocent people sometimes go to jail.
I believe that something terrible happened to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a house party in Maryland more than three decades ago, and that she sincerely believes -- and has always believed -- the culprit was Brett Kavanaugh. The same Brett Kavanaugh who is now a federal judge who has been nominated to the Supreme Court.
Ford was authentic, believable and effective in her testimony Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Only partisan Republicans, acting out of reflex, would say otherwise.
But I also found Kavanaugh authentic, believable and effective -- especially when he talked about the enormous cost to loved ones, including his daughters, and how his family had been "destroyed" by these accusations and the spiteful way in which they were handled by members of the committee. Only partisan Democrats, acting out of reflex, could not see that.
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