Photo by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/armoire/221403997/">armoire</a> used under a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> license.
Not that this is relevant to her ability to serve on the Supreme Court, but Sonia Sotomayor clearly has an addictive personality. A profile of the judge in Thursday’s Washington Post reveals that during her heady days as a prosecutor in New York, Sotomayor smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. When President Obama was narrowing down his choices to fill the soon to be vacant slot on the U.S. Supreme Court, was he trying to find someone to sneak cigarettes with?
But that’s not all:
The prosecutors were expected to juggle 80 to 100 cases at a time, and in her years there Sotomayor tried perhaps 20 cases before juries. She survived by becoming, in the words of her friend Dawn Cardi, a “caffeine addict” who started her day with a Tab, one of maybe 20 she threw back on an average day…
It’s great to see that Sotomayor has vices like the rest of us. But 20 a day? I (Nick) like my diet soda, but I’ve never had more than two 2-liter bottles, and that’s on a really bad day. Sotomayor’s habit was the equivalent of over three and a half 2-liter bottles a day. That’s a lot of cola. And the 936 mg of caffeine in 20 Tabs is the equivalent of around nine brewed coffees. Add in 30 cigarettes, and you’ve got one wired prosecutor.
Whether she still smokes (or drinks Tab) seems to be a mystery, though Sotomayor reportedly now works out at the gym three days a week or so, suggesting that she may have kicked the habit. Of course, Obama works out a lot too, and he still gets caught puffing once in a while. Perhaps the Judiciary Committee will ask her about this. After all, smoking is probably a lot more relevant to her longevity on the bench than the fact that she has diabetes, which has also come up during the debate.
