During her debut performance on the Supreme Court bench Monday, Sonia Sotomayor asked more questions in one hour than Clarence Thomas did over the course of several years, according to McClatchy News Service.
The famously taciturn Thomas went for two entire years -- or 144 consecutive cases -- without making a single statement, the AP reported in 2008.
By contrast, Sotomayor on Monday asked as many questions as Chief Justice John G. Roberts, according to the Washington Post.
The case centered on how long police must honor a suspect's request for an attorney. It involved the 2003 arrest of a Maryland man on suspicion of child sexual abuse. While the suspect, Michael Blaine Shatzer, was in prison, questions about a new case arose -- one that involved allegations that he had sexually abused his 3-year-old son. Shatzer refused to answer them, and requested an attorney. The case went dormant.
When more evidence came to light three years later, Shatzer gave an incriminating testimony. But the state's highest court blocked his statement from the record, pointing to a decades-old Supreme Court decision stating that suspects who ask for an attorney need not answer any more questions until a lawyer is made available.
Thomas has publicly addressed his silence on the bench. He has attributed it in part to his struggle as a child in Georgia to learn standard English after growing up speaking a dialect called Geechee, which thrived among former slaves, the AP reported.
But in recent years he has placed greater emphasis on another reason: a desire to minimize redundant back and forth exchanges on the bench.
"We are there to decide cases, not to engage in seminar discussions," he once told U.S. News and World Report.
