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Sotomayor was on Capitol Hill on Thursday for the first time in weeks, meeting with newly sworn-in Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., the most junior member of the Judiciary Committee. She appeared cheerful as she chatted with him before their private talk, telling reporters her broken ankle was feeling much better.

Meanwhile, Republicans previewed the tough treatment she can expect at next week's hearings, keeping up a steady stream of criticism about her record. The Senate's Republican leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, cited an article she wrote raising questions about the propriety of private campaign contributions, and an appellate court ruling in which a panel she joined upheld Vermont's strict limits on raising and spending campaign money.

"Over the past several weeks, we've heard about a number of instances in which Judge Sotomayor's personal views seem to call into question her evenhanded application of the law," McConnell said.

Several of the Senate's Democratic women defended Sotomayor.

"Judge Sotomayor's developed a record as a moderate judge who agrees with her more conservative colleagues far more frequently than she disagrees with them," said New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

As Democrats worked to show Sotomayor isn't biased, an independent research group released a new study showing that as a trial judge, she typically handed out tougher prison sentences than her colleagues in the federal courthouse in Manhattan, especially to white-collar criminals.

Nearly half the people Sotomayor sentenced for financial fraud and other white-collar crimes received at least six months in prison, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By contrast, roughly one out of three white-collar convicts received similarly lengthy prison terms from the other trial judges in the Southern District of New York, the study found.

Sotomayor served as a trial judge from 1992 to 1998, when she joined the federal appeals court in New York.

TRAC looked at 7,750 criminal cases handled by 52 judges during that period. Sotomayor presided over 261 of those prosecutions. TRAC obtained the data from the Justice Department under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

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Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

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