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Thread: The Sudden and Unexplained Rapture of America’s Federal Judiciary

  1. #51
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Corrupt Congressman and formerly corrupt judge Alcee Hastings has died.

    https://floridapolitics.com/archives...cancer-battle/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #52
    Senior Member Member FLMetfan's Avatar
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    Good Riddance
    "I am the warden! Get your warden off this gurney and shut up! You are not in America. This is the island of Barbados. People will see you doing this." Monty Delk's last words.

  3. #53
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
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    Paywall.......

    NY Federal Judge Sandra Feuerstein Killed In Fla. Accident

    https://www.law360.com/articles/1374...n-fla-accident

  4. #54
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    At this point last year we were at 17 dead judges. We are only two behind, it seems that the rapture is still full steam ahead a year on.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #55
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    Former U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell, longtime Nashville legal mind and adviser to a vice president, dead at 64

    U.S. District Judge Todd J. Campbell, a longtime Nashville resident who rose to counsel an American vice president before ascending to the federal bench, has died. He was 64.

    The cause of death was multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disease Campbell battled for years, according to Nashville attorney Byron Trauger, a partner in Trauger & Tuke and a longtime friend of Campbell’s.

    Campbell died early Sunday, Trauger confirmed.

    Campbell attended public schools in Nashville, graduating from McGavock High School in 1974, before attending Vanderbilt University and the University of Tennessee Law School. Campbell practiced law at Gullett, Sanford, Robinson and Martin in Nashville after his 1982 law school graduation, becoming an expert in Tennessee constitutional law and federal election law.

    This expertise helped him become legal adviser to U.S. Sen. Al Gore Jr.’s 1988 presidential campaign. The Tennessee Democrat’s subsequent selection as Bill Clinton’s running mate in 1992 and the electoral win that followed brought Campbell to Washington, where he served as counsel to the transition and then counsel and director of administration in the vice presidential office.

    Gore called him a "steadfast protector" of the rights of Tennesseans and an advocate for those whose voices are often overlooked.

    "He was as thoughtful in his application of the law as he was warm and generous in his leadership and community service," Gore wrote in an email Sunday afternoon. "In his 21 years as a Judge, Todd never wavered in the hard work of bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice. I was fortunate to benefit from his wisdom and sage counsel during my time in the Senate and as Vice President and cherished his friendship and guidance in the years since."

    Campbell returned to Nashville and private practice in 1995, but Clinton soon appointed him to fill a district court seat after Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr. took senior status. It was a significant change in direction for the former political aide, but one he handled with grace, Trauger said.

    “As a lawyer, Todd was a skilled advocate and a champion of democratic values and Democratic ideas,” Trauger wrote in an email. “But when he took the bench, Judge Campbell was strictly nonpartisan, brilliant, even-handed, and a champion of the rule of law and of our Constitution.”

    Former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist was in his first year in the senate when Clinton nominated Campbell, and said his quick appointment was indicative of the judge's reputation as a public servant.

    "Todd Campbell was highly respected by both political parties for his fairness. His wisdom and sense of equity elevated him above others. He inspired and encouraged us all to be better citizens and he was a champion for civic engagement," Frist wrote in a statement Sunday afternoon.

    Campbell presided over some 8,400 cases and 1,600 criminal prosecutions, conducting more than 200 trials.

    His long list of high-profile cases contained some that reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, including a case involving Brentwood Academy’s 1990s-era claim that the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s attempts to police its football recruiting practices constituted a violation of the school’s First and 14th Amendment rights. Campbell also presided over federal cases surrounding Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman, whose 1987 murder conviction and death sentence continued making headlines in 2020; Perry March, who inspired international intrigue after the suspicious disappearance of his wife, Janet March; and Paul Dennis Reid, the notorious serial killer of Nashville-area food-service workers.

    "Todd was not a showy man," said Jack Robinson, Sr., former senior partner in Campbell's first Nashville law firm. "He was a man of intellect, and he was a man of reserve. His loss today is a sorrowful one. He will be missed."

    As the cases stacked up and the years slipped by, Campbell’s acumen as a judge became apparent in his ability to recall key details of cases and events from long past.

    “He had such an incredible memory,” said Charlotte Rappuhn, one of Campbell’s clerks for more than 20 years along with Janet Phelps. “He could even remember the questions on some of his law school exams. Janet and I were always amazed.”

    Campbell served as chief judge of the Middle Tennessee District from 2005 to 2012 and retired in 2016. He served as an adjunct professor at the UT law school, as well as the Nashville School of Law and Belmont University.

    Although Campbell issued many legal opinions, one of his proudest decisions as judge involved a fixture in his historic courtroom, the same courtroom where Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa was tried in 1962.

    A portrait of Judge West Humphreys had hung quietly in the courtroom for decades despite Humphreys’ infamous impeachment and removal from the bench for accepting an appointment to a Confederate judgeship during the Civil War. For Campbell, it was an easy decision.

    “There were two good, separate reasons to take down the portrait of West Humphreys,” Campbell later remembered. “… He was a Confederate Judge; and … he was impeached, convicted and removed from the U.S. District Court.”

    Campbell met his wife, Margaret Akers, while serving on the Gore campaign in 1988. They were married 33 years. She survives him along with two adult sons, Seth Campbell and Holt Campbell.

    U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper of Nashville said Campbell was "brilliant and humble."

    “My prayers are with Margaret, who cared for him so well, right through the end. Seth and Holt have lost a dad; the community has lost a great legal mind and a superb jurist," Cooper said Sunday.

    Gore's former chief of staff Roy Neel said Campbell's strength sometimes came from the moments no one knows about. His work in the vice president's office required discretion, which Campbell always provided, he said.

    "Todd was a consummate lawyer and constant professional. He succeeded not by browbeating people, but by leading them and convincing them in a very thoughtful way. Even more important than his legal legacy was that he was just a really, really nice guy," Neel said. "He was the kind of person that you wanted to spend time with and you knew he would be a trusted friend. You knew would ways have your back."

    Campbell was born Sept. 5, 1956, in Rockford, Illinois. Having grown up in the Donelson community — moving there at age 4 after his father took a job at Aladdin — Campbell took an interest in the Tennessee School for the Blind, which has been located there since 1952. Wondering about volunteer opportunities, Campbell, unprompted, reached out to the school somewhere around 2007.

    He later recalled to The Tennessean in 2016 that his initial inquiries were met with silence until eventually he received a note from Superintendent Jim Oldham.

    “He said, ‘Dear Judge Campbell, we got your letter, and we thought it was a joke,” Campbell said.

    Federal judges didn’t often spontaneously reach out to the school.

    “When Judge Campbell explained that he wanted to expand our student’s knowledge of the Constitution and our judicial system I was totally overwhelmed,” Oldham said recently. “I wanted to be sure he was aware that our classes were very small by most school standards. … Also that a good number of our students had secondary physical or learning challenges. That did not change his commitment in the least.”

    Campbell was happy to meet the students, explain his job and wax poetic about democracy, spending hours meeting with multiple groups of students.

    “And the rest, as they say in the social studies business, was history,” Oldham said. “Thank you, Judge Campbell, for reaching out to some special kids and sharing your time and knowledge.”

    Outside of the courtroom, Campbell proudly presided over naturalization ceremonies whenever possible, remembers Cooper's chief of staff, and Campbell family friend, Lisa Quigley. In those moments, Campbell would share his own family's immigration story, she said.

    "In the telling of that story at naturalization ceremonies, with slides of family photographs and humorous detail of his own family’s immigrant story, his personal arc and life journey narrowed the gap between the powerful man in the black robe and the newly-minted citizens — mostly people of color— sitting before him," she wrote.

    "He said, 'We are now the same, with the same rights and responsibilities of citizenship,' and he meant it. And our proud newest citizens always adjusted themselves a little, suddenly sitting just a bit taller in their seats."

    Campbell is expected to be buried in a private ceremony Tuesday. A public event in his memory will be planned for a future date, Trauger confirmed.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fo...BingNewsSearch

  6. #56
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    Former federal judge George P. Kazen dies

    George P. Kazen, a U.S. district judge for the Laredo division of the Southern District of Texas for nearly 40 years and whose name now bequeaths Laredo’s federal courthouse, has died at age 81.

    Kazen was nominated by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to this seat on the U.S. district court, and he retired in 2018. He was widely regarded for his genius legal mind and was known as a thorough, fair judge.

    From 1996 to 2003, Kazen served as chief judge for the Southern District of Texas, and in 2003 the chief justice appointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

    He assumed senior status in 2009, but Kazen remained extremely active, handling a third of the Laredo Division’s criminal and civil dockets until his retirement.

    Kazen, a father of four, was a devout Catholic who has served on the Red Mass planning committee since the Diocese of Laredo’s inception in 2000. He also made regular contributions to Catholic charities.

    The judge was married to the late Barbara Ann Kazen, a civic leader who was known for her work with the Bethany House of Laredo.

    He was a native of Laredo.

    Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar reflected Tuesday on the community’s loss.

    “Today is a very sad day for our community as we mourn the loss of a great pillar. Federal Judge George P. Kazen will be forever missed and will always be remembered for his excellent service to our community, his family and our country,” Cuellar said. “When I was a Department of Public Safety trooper, I had to testify at his court and he was always fair and professional. I still remember the many times he swore me in as Sheriff, and for that, he will forever hold a special place in my heart.

    “My condolences to his family and friends. May he Rest In Peace. He leaves behind a great legacy, and I am certain that his work and many sacrifices will transcend through generations to come. A true man of justice he was.”

    Laredo’s U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar remarked on Kazen’s death in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

    “If you were lucky enough to have met the Honorable George P. Kazen, you’d know that he was an exceptional judge as well as friend,” he wrote.

    https://www.chron.com/news/article/F...s-16135249.php

  7. #57
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    'We lost a giant': First Black judge on Florida Supreme Court dies in Tallahassee

    Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, who marked many milestones in a legal career spanning more than a half century, died in Tallahassee Friday. He was 88.

    He was the first Black member of the state’s highest court, appointed by Gov. Reubin Askew in 1975. President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal four years later, making him the lone Black member of the Atlanta-based federal court at the time.

    “His legal prowess was unmatched,” said Sean Shaw, an attorney and son of former Justice Leander Shaw, a later African-American member of the Supreme Court.

    In a Facebook post, Tallahassee attorney Sean Pittman recalled Hatchett as “a staple for equal justice that all of Florida can be proud of.”

    "We lost a giant yesterday as Justice Joe Hatchett ascended to the heavens," he wrote.

    Veteran Republican activist Al Cardenas said, “Justice Hatchett did more to promote fair elections in Florida than anyone during his time on the bench.”

    Joseph Woodrow Hatchett was born in Clearwater Sept. 17, 1932, in an era of rigid segregation. He graduated from FAMU in 1954 and joined the Army as a second lieutenant, then earned his law degree at Howard University.

    In 1959, he took the Florida Bar exam and began private practice in Daytona Beach. His practice included civil rights work at a time Florida and the South were embroiled in numerous important cases.

    Hatchett became an assistant U.S. attorney in 1966 and he was designated first assistant for the Middle District the following year. He became a federal magistrate in 1971.

    After Askew named him to the state’s top bench in 1975, Hatchett became the only Black candidate to win a competitive statewide election the following year. Shortly afterward, the state switched to the current system of retention elections for justices, who no longer face individual challengers.

    He served four years before Carter named him to the Fifth Circuit Court.

    Hatchett retired from the bench in 1999 and joined the Akerman law firm in Tallahassee.

    He was preceded in death by his wife Betty Hatchett. He is survived by his children, Cheryl Clark and Brenda Hatchett, and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren.

    https://www.tallahassee.com/story/ne...ee/4904706001/

  8. #58
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    Glen Conrad, longtime federal judge, dies

    U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad has died. The judge, a Radford native who held court in Roanoke and Charlottesville, was 71.

    Conrad, who died on Thursday, served the Western District of Virginia as both a magistrate judge and a district judge for 45 years, according to a district court statement released Friday.

    He was appointed magistrate judge in 1976, the year after he began his career as a probation officer and law clerk in Abingdon. Conrad, who received his bachelor’s and law degrees from the College of William & Mary, was the nation’s youngest magistrate judge at the time and went on to serve in that role for 27 years, presiding in Abingdon, Charlottesville and Roanoke.

    President George W. Bush nominated Conrad to be a U.S. District Judge, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him. He was chief judge from 2010 to 2017, taking senior status at the end of 2017. That entitled him to a reduced workload, but he continued to maintain a full civil caseload, according to the court’s statement.

    He was diagnosed with brain cancer that year and received treatment at Duke University. He returned to work, and continued there until about a month ago, after the cancer recurred, friends said.

    “He’s just a judicial icon,” longtime friend John Fishwick Jr. said. His decades on the bench are “just a phenomenal record of service to our country.”

    His wife of 39 years, Mary Ann Steger Conrad, survives him.

    https://roanoke.com/news/local/glen-...b88e1ae03.html

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    Robert Katzmann, U.S. Judge With Reach Beyond the Bench, Dies at 68

    As chief of the Second Circuit in New York, he championed immigrants’ rights, judicial transparency and schooling the public on the law. In 2019 he dealt Trump a blow.

    Robert A. Katzmann, who as chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York helped guarantee legal representation to immigrants, championed civic education and demystified judicial proceedings for the public, died on Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 68.

    The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Jennifer Callahan, said. He had recently assumed senior status on the federal bench when his seven-year term as chief judge ended.

    As the son and grandson of Jewish refugees who fled Germany and Russia, Judge Katzmann was instrumental in the establishment of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the first government-funded program of legal assistance for noncitizens who were being held by the authorities under one federal law or another.

    “There’s kind of a myth in the air that we’ll have reform and the problem will go away,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “Implementation tends to be an afterthought.”

    With the support of the antipoverty group the Robin Hood Foundation, the New York project evolved in 2014 into the Immigrant Justice Corps, the nation’s first fellowship program dedicated to providing competent counsel for immigrants.

    “Almost single-handedly he convinced the organized bar to provide free quality representation for thousands of needy immigrants,” said Jed S. Rakoff, a senior U.S. District Court Judge. “No judge ever took a broader view of the role of a judge in promoting justice in our society, or was more successful in turning those views into practical accomplishment.”

    United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, quoted last year in the Federal Bar Council Quarterly, hailed Judge Katzmann as having “an innate sense of justice, morality and integrity” and called him “a visionary who brings out the best in people.”

    In his book “Judging Statutes” (2014), a primer on how the courts should interpret congressional legislation, Judge Katzmann rejected strict textualism, which relies solely and literally on the letter of the law, in favor of what he called purposivism — determining the drafters’ intent by reviewing memos, committee reports and other documents that led to the writing of a law.

    “Ignoring such guidance increases the probability that a judge will construe a law at odds with legislative meaning, and potentially more in line with the judge’s own intuitions and policy preferences,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2016, in response to a review of his book by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who now sits on the Supreme Court.

    “A judge’s work takes place not on the lofty plane of grand, unified theory, but on the ground of commonsense inquiry,” he asserted.

    In 2018, Justice Katzmann wrote the Second Circuit court’s majority opinion in Zarda v. Altitude Express that the 1964 Civil Rights Act barred employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

    The next year, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, he held in Trump v. Vance that the president of the United States was not immune from a state grand jury subpoena that directs a third party to produce nonprivileged material in its investigation of potential crimes.

    The case concerned a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The appeals court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the subpoena, which sought eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns.

    Both the Zarda and Trump rulings were affirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

    In 2017, Judge Katzmann, a consensus builder, issued a rare dissent when the Second Circuit court, overruling a District Court judge, said in Watson v. United States that a U.S. citizen who had been wrongfully detained for 1,273 days was not entitled to sue the government for damages because he had not filed his claim in a timely manner.

    Even as a boy he sought to engage himself in civic affairs. When he was 9 he wrote to President John F. Kennedy on behalf of members of the Seneca tribe who had lost their territory to a flood control project. As a second-grader, in a letter to Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., he complained about a problematic traffic light in his Queens neighborhood.

    Widely credited as the first federal judge to hold a doctoral degree in government, he believed that while justice ought to be blind, the process of meting it out should be transparent.

    To that end, in 2014, he and U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero launched the Committee on Civic Education, which culminated in Justice For All: Courts and the Community, an educational initiative to make the judicial system more accessible. During the pandemic, audio of courtroom sessions were live-streamed for the first time.

    “What I really wanted to do was bring our courts and our communities closer together,” Judge Katzmann told The New York Law Journal last year. “If I had to say what is my signature initiative, if one can ever talk that way, it would be that.”

    Robert Allen Katzmann was born on April 22, 1953, in Manhattan eight minutes ahead of his identical twin brother, Gary. Judge Gary Katzmann was appointed to the United States Court of International Trade in 2016 after serving as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court.

    In addition to his wife, who is an artist, and twin brother, his survivors include two other siblings, Susan Horner and Martin Katzmann. Judge Katzmann lived in Manhattan.

    His paternal grandfather died in Nazi Germany in 1938 during the Kristallnacht pogrom. His father, John, an electrical engineer, and his grandmother arrived in the United States in March 1941. His mother, Sylvia (Butner) Katzmann, who was born in Brooklyn, was a homemaker.

    His parents instilled in the Katzmann children the “centrality of treating people with dignity and kindness,” Justice Sotomayor said.

    After graduating from Forest Hills High School in Queens, Robert earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1973 and a master’s and doctorate in government from Harvard, where he was a teaching assistant to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was soon to become a United States senator from New York and who would later recommend him for the federal bench. He received a law degree from Yale Law School in 1980.

    After clerking for Judge Hugh H. Bownes of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, he was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington from 1981 to 1999 and a law professor at Georgetown University.

    Before he was nominated for the Circuit Court by President Bill Clinton in 1999, Judge Katzmann’s only previous federal job was working in a post office one summer. He had never regularly practiced law. He served as chief judge of the Second Circuit court from 2013 through last August.

    Chief Justice John Roberts appointed him chairman of the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on the Judicial Branch, and he was a professor at the New York University School of Law.

    As a descendant of immigrants, Judge Katzmann presided over the largest naturalization ceremony ever held on Ellis Island and the first naturalization ceremony to be held on the rebuilt World Trade Center site in Manhattan.

    In an interview on C-SPAN in 2014, Judge Katzmann provided some insight into how he decided a case.

    “I don’t really think about being reversed by the Supreme Court,” he said. “I think about trying to follow the law where the precedents direct me to go in a certain direction and where the precedents don’t.”

    Since Federal judgeships are lifetime appointments, he was asked how long he hoped to remain on the bench.

    “I’d love to stay on as long as my brain is working,” he replied.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/u...mann-dead.html

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