“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

Does this mean that if you are poor, gay, black, disabled, old, you may commit crimes with impunity, or at least be less harshly punished for doing so? It does suggest that poverty, homosexuality, being of a minority race, physical impairment and old age are irresistible forces compelling criminal behavior. Isn’t that insulting to everyone who is poor, gay, black, disabled and old but does not commit crime?

Obama seems to ‘think’ (does he ever really?) that it is identity, who or what people are, that should determine how they are dealt with in the courts rather than the merit of their particular case.

True, the law does at present make special concessions for the juvenile and the lunatic. Now will the courts decree that people who are poor, gay, black or old may not, like children and madmen, be held responsible for their actions?  

If this is how judges are going to judge, it means quite simply the end of the rule of law. The walls, floor, and ceiling of our safety will be gone. 

Why should being any of the things on his list make you more liable to do wrong – and why should it make you a victim of other people’s pity (whether the real kind or the kind pretended to by left-liberal-progressives)?    

Most revealing of all is Obama’s view that if you are African-American you need special indulgence because just being black you are at some unavoidable disadvantage – a particularly strange thing for a president who is himself African-American to believe.  

All we can hope for is that in the Obama courts, mercy may be tempered by justice.