Trump appointee to sentencing commissioon wants to abolish it, thinks blacks and latinos are more violent

NPR =-One of President Trump's picks for a seat on the body that sets policy used to punish 70,000 federal criminals every year has publicly called to abolish that agency, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and has a history of making racially charged remarks about crime.

William G. Otis is a former federal prosecutor in Virginia, special counsel to former President George H.W. Bush and an adviser at the Drug Enforcement Administration. He currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

But it's his years-long record of public comments and Internet posts on crime and drugs that have drawn fire from civil rights groups and prisoner advocates.

On his Crime and Consequences blog, Otis wrote: "When Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones said at a University of Pennsylvania Law School talk that blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites, a consortium of civil rights organizations filed a complaint. The complaint calls for stern discipline, on the grounds that the remarks were 'discriminatory and biased.' "

He added: "So far as I have been able to discover, it makes no mention of the fact that they're true."