Fit to Judge?
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy hasn’t acted on the nomination of Federal District Judge Robert Conrad of Charlotte, NC, to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. President Bush nominated Conrad for the position on July 17, 2007. 
In 1999, when Conrad was a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Western North Carolina, he went after a group of nuns who opposed the death penalty. In a letter to the editor printed in the Catholic Dossier, he referred to Sister Helen Prejean as a “church-hating nun” and said her book was merely “liberal drivel.”
Conrad attacked Planned Parenthood in a Charlotte Observer Op-Ed titled “Planned Parenthood: A Radical, Pro-Abortion Fringe Group.” In the article he claimed “Planned Parenthood knowingly kills unborn babies, not fetuses, as a method of ‘post-conception’ contraception, and to them that’s OK.”
“His statements make me wonder,” Leahy said, “whether any person going before Judge Conrad in a case involving reproductive rights, or indeed any issues relating to personal privacy, will feel their arguments have been fairly heard.”
Sen. Leahy and Judge Conrad are both Catholic.
