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  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Federal District Courts

    Marco Rubio Blocks Gay Black Judge's Nomination To Federal Bench, Puzzling Everyone

    Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has withdrawn his support from a federal judicial nominee that he previously recommended -- William Thomas, a gay black judge from Miami -- and, to the anger and puzzlement of many, is preventing the nomination from moving forward at all.

    Thomas would have made history, if confirmed, as the first openly gay black man to serve as a federal judge. Rubio initially recommended Thomas to President Barack Obama late last year as a nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. There's a particular urgency to filling the judgeship, vacant for 18 months. The court backlog is so bad that the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts has deemed it a “judicial emergency."

    But something changed in recent months. Rubio withheld his consent for the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing on Thomas' nomination. It takes both home-state senators to sign off on a confirmation hearing, so without Rubio's approval, Thomas has been stuck in limbo. Florida's other senator, Bill Nelson (D), gave his backing to Thomas months ago.

    It wasn't clear until this week that Rubio doesn't plan to let Thomas move at all. A Rubio spokeswoman told The Huffington Post on Wednesday that the senator decided to pull his support after "a thorough review" of Thomas' record, including two cases that Thomas handled as a Miami-Dade circuit judge. One involves a hit-and-run case with a bicyclist, another involves a death penalty sentence.

    Rubio's spokeswoman described Thomas' handling of those cases as "troubling."

    A review of materials provided to HuffPost by Rubio's office, used by Rubio to justify sinking Thomas's nomination, suggests nothing egregious in either case. Instead, it appears Rubio is criticizing Thomas for being too lenient in one case and too emotional in the other.

    In the hit-and-run case, Thomas sentenced Michele Traverso to 22 months in prison for a crash that killed the cyclist. Rubio's office highlighted the sentence as the minimum, and said the victim's family had pressed for the maximum. But, as The New York Times reported this week, both the lead prosecutor in the case and the administrative judge wrote letters to Rubio saying Thomas acted fairly and within the law.

    The other case involved the 2002 rape and murder of 18-year-old Ana Maria Angel and resulted in Thomas throwing out a murder confession because two of five defendants either had not been read their Miranda rights or didn't understand them. Rubio appears to be criticizing Thomas for deciding to keep the confession out of the case. All five men were ultimately convicted or pleaded guilty. Rubio's office highlighted that Thomas "broke down in tears" as he handed down a death sentence for one of the defendants. However, as reported by the Miami Herald, Thomas wept not for the defendant, but as he finished describing the brutality of the murder.

    Sen. Nelson didn't respond to HuffPost's inquiry about his thoughts.

    Other Florida lawmakers and judicial groups speculated that Rubio's opposition may be fueled by politics. The senator may be trying to win back love from his tea party base after angering them by backing immigration reform this year. Rubio's name has been floated as a 2016 presidential contender, and he's recently been aligning himself with tea party conservatives in the Senate.

    "Judge Thomas is a well-qualified jurist," said Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) "There is a serious underrepresentation of minorities on the bench and partisan obstructionism isn’t making it any better."

    Hastings is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which went after Rubio in July for stalling action on Thomas and another black judicial nominee.

    "A mere 12 percent of federal judgeships are held by black judges," said Hastings. "This is an issue of great concern to me."

    Michelle Schwartz of Alliance for Justice, a left-leaning association of more than 100 organizations focused on the federal judiciary, noted that Thomas has broad support from law enforcement groups in his home state. The League of Prosecutors, for one, sent Rubio a glowing review of Thomas in December.

    "Judge William Thomas has been a fair and thoughtful jurist in Florida; that's why he's won support from police organizations and prosecutors alike," Schwartz said. "Senator Rubio's withdrawal of support from such a talented nominee has no valid basis and is nothing more than a political effort to pander to conservatives."

    Civil rights groups said they're somewhere between puzzled and furious about Rubio's change of heart.

    "There’s something bigger at work here, but it’s hard to figure out why he would be opposed," said Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign. "Judge Thomas is a well-qualified jurist."

    Sharon Lettman-Hicks, executive director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition, suggested homophobia and racism may be in play.

    "As a Floridian for more than 25 years, I am aghast by Senator Rubio's withdrawal of support for the nomination of Judge William Thomas," said Lettman-Hicks. "Senator Rubio’s newfound opposition seems only to serve as a thinly-veiled mask for the racism and homophobia that permeates his tea party politics. This brand of political theatrics is unfit for the U.S. Senate, and is beneath the dignity of Judge Thomas."

    Back in Florida, Thomas' supporters have launched an online petition urging Rubio to let the confirmation process move forward. "The time to act is now and therefore we request that Senator Rubio put politics aside and immediately issue a 'blue slip' allowing for Judge Thomas nomination process to move forward," it reads.

    Asked for a response to criticisms that Rubio's actions are purely political, Rubio's spokeswoman simply reiterated that the senator is troubled by Thomas' record.

    Thomas' record "raised serious concerns about his fitness for a lifetime federal appointment," said the spokeswoman.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3996156.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Obama nominates Ronnie White to federal judgeship he was once denied

    Back in the administration of President Bill Clinton, the nomination of Missouri Supreme Court Justice Ronnie L. White languished in the Senate for nearly two years before being rejected on a party-line vote.

    Thursday afternoon, President Barack Obama nominated White to serve on the federal bench in Missouri’s Eastern District, raising the prospect that White will finally reach the court.

    Obama also nominated Nancy Rosenstengel for a federal judgeship in the Southern District of Illinois, where she has served as Clerk of the Court since 2009.

    Obama said in a statement that White, Rosenstengel and his nominee for a judgeship in Wisconsin had the “talent, expertise, and fair-mindedness Americans expect and deserve from their judicial system.”

    White, 60, sat on the Missouri Supreme Court from 1995 to 2007 and held the position of chief justice from 2003 to 2005. He was the first African-American on Missouri’s high court.

    After Clinton nominated White for a judgeship, then-Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., organized opposition in the GOP-run Senate. White was defeated, 54-45, in October 1999.

    Clinton argued that Republicans were treating White and several Hispanic nominees in a partisan and unfair way. White’s rejection foreshadowed the polarization that would take root in Congress in coming years.

    White’s supporters accused Ashcroft of racism, an allegation that Ashcroft strongly denied.

    “The nomination was rejected on the merits, principally the nominee’s poor record on the death penalty and drug enforcement,” Ashcroft, who would become U.S. attorney general, wrote afterward.

    Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond and an expert on the federal judiciary, recalled the episode as unusual.

    “I think very few, if any district nominees have been filibustered,” he said Thursday. “I recall that a lot of people believed he was well-qualified to sit on the district bench. Fourteen years later, maybe he’s finally going to be a federal judge.”

    White has been a partner in the St. Louis law firm of Holloran White Schwartz & Gaertner LLP since leaving the court. Before becoming a judge, he was city counselor for St. Louis.

    Rosenstengel, of Belleville, became court clerk in 2009 and was law clerk for Southern District Judge Patrick Murphy before that. She worked five years in private practice at Sandberg, Phoenix & von Gontard in St. Louis.

    http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/g...937d37b5e.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary

    Donald Trump is set to inherit an uncommon number of vacancies in the federal courts in addition to the open Supreme Court seat, giving the president-elect a monumental opportunity to reshape the judiciary after taking office.

    The estimated 103 judicial vacancies that President Obama is expected to hand over to Trump in the Jan. 20 transition of power is nearly double the 54 openings Obama found eight years ago following George W. Bush’s presidency.

    Confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl after Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015. Obama White House officials blame Senate Republicans for what they characterize as an unprecedented level of obstruction in blocking the Democratic president’s court picks.

    The result is a multitude of openings throughout the federal circuit and district courts that will allow the new Republican president to quickly make a wide array of lifetime appointments.

    Trump transition officials declined to comment on the process of selecting nominees, but incoming White House Counsel Don McGahn is expected to play a key role. Such groups as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working with the Trump team to suggest possible candidates.

    The judiciary also is a top priority for McConnell, who stands ready to help the Trump White House identify candidates and grease the sometimes-laborious Senate confirmation process.

    The Trump administration and the Senate will be under pressure to quickly install judges in courts around the country where cases are severely backlogged because of long-vacant seats.

    There are 38 so-called judicial emergencies, according to the nonpartisan Judicial Conference, including in Texas, where seven seats have sat empty for more than one year. The Obama administration and the state’s two conservative Republican senators could not come to an agreement on nominees for the many openings.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.1a6e63ed0145
    "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

  4. #4
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Green Light for the Habeas Fast Track

    By Kent Scheidegger
    crimeandconsequences.com

    When the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 was enacted, the "fast track" under Chapter 154 was thought to be among the primary reforms. In essence, states which provided qualified and adequately funded counsel for their state collateral reviews in capital cases (which is not constitutionally required) were promised an expedited trip through federal habeas corpus.

    Many obstacles have prevented the implementation of this chapter as originally conceived. First, the original chapter had a hostile reception in the courts, as the courts which would be subject to its deadlines misconstrued it to avoid applying it. In 2006, Congress amended the law to abrogate some specific misinterpretations and to take the decision of whether a state qualified away from the conflicted habeas courts and give it to the U.S. Attorney General with review by the D.C. Circuit. The AG was further charged with adopting regulations to implement the statute.

    Surprisingly, under the Bush Administration Attorney General Mukasey dragged his feet and did not issue regulations until the very end of the Administration. AG Holder then caved in to a legal challenge, rescinded the regulations, and dragged his feet issuing new ones. The new ones give the defense much more than it is entitled to, including a patently illegal five-year expiration date on the certification, but two organizations of defense lawyers filed suit against the regulations anyway, steering the case to their favorite judge.

    Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, California issued an injunction against implementation of the regulations. After a very leisurely appeal, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled unanimously that she had no jurisdiction to do so.

    First, organizations of defense lawyers have no standing to attack the regulations. They are not injured by them.

    Second, an attack on the regulations is premature until they have been applied to a particular application.

    That decision was issued 10 months ago. Since then, the plaintiffs have sought rehearing, rehearing en banc, and a stay of mandate from the Ninth Circuit, all of which were denied. Then they filed a bizarre pleading entitled, "En Banc Motion to Stay the Mandate." There is no such procedure. The court generously construed this as a motion to reconsider the panel's previous denial, rather than sanctioning them for a frivolous pleading, and denied it.

    Then the plaintiffs filed a certiorari petition in the U.S. Supreme Court and asked the high court to recall and stay the mandate. Today the court denied that motion.

    So, Judge Wilken has the mandate of the Ninth Circuit "to dismiss this case for lack of jurisdiction." All requests to stay it have been denied. This illegal order is no longer a barrier, and the pending applications of Texas and Arizona for certification can proceed.

    And, thanks to all the illegitimate delays, they will proceed before Jeff Sessions's Department of Justice and not Eric Holder's or Loretta Lynch's. The cloud does have a silver lining.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...-fas.html#more

  5. #5
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    SCOTUS Turns Down Habeas Fast Track Case

    By Kent Scheidegger
    crimeandconsequences.com

    The U.S. Supreme Court today denied certiorari in the case that sought to block implementation of the "fast track" for the processing of federal habeas corpus petitions by state death-row inmates. See the docket for Habeas Corpus Research Center v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, No. 16-880. The Ninth Circuit threw the case out a year ago, holding that the District Court had no jurisdiction to issue the injunction that it did.

    The law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe has been representing the interests of murderers against those of victims and law-abiding people contra bono publico in this case as well as the Proposition 66 case. One can only wonder if America has completely run out of deserving poor people to represent pro bono, given how many blue chip firms are devoting their unpaid representation hours to the interests of people who thoroughly deserve the fate they are facing and who are in their present situation solely because they chose, as an act of free will, to take the life of an innocent person.

    In retrospect, though, Orrick did actually achieve something "for the public good." As a result of the delay they caused, the initial precedent-setting decisions in applications under Chapter 154 will be rendered by a Department of Justice headed by Jeff Sessions rather than Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch. In the long run, that may well be worth the delay.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...eas-fast-.html

  6. #6
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
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    Trailblazer Detroit federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor dies

    U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, the first black woman to serve as chief judge of the federal bench in Detroit, who spent much of her six-decade-long career shunning the spotlight, died over the weekend.

    She was 84.

    "It was with sadness that we have learned that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor passed away over the weekend," Court Administrator Dave Weaver wrote in an e-mail to staff Monday. "Our thoughts are with Judge Taylor's family at this difficult time."

    According to court officials, Taylor died Saturday night at Sunrise of Grosse Pointe Woods, an assisted living center, following a brief illness.

    Taylor was a liberal with Democratic roots who defended civil rights workers in the South in the 1960s. She was appointed to the federal bench in 1979 by then President Jimmy Carter.

    During her extensive legal career, the former City of Detroit staff attorney helped Coleman Young become the first elected black mayor of Detroit and later defended his efforts to integrate city government in the mid-1970s. Yet, as a judge, she declared unconstitutional a program that reserved municipal contracts for minority vendors.

    During her years on the bench, she presided over several high-profile cases and did not shy away from controversy, according to a 2006 Free Press profile of Taylor.

    In 2006, she struck down the Bush Administration’s warrantless domestic spying program that secretly intercepted international phone calls and e-mails of people in the pursuit of terrorism suspects.

    In declaring the program unconstitutional, Taylor wrote: "It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights."

    An appeals court later overturned her decision.

    In 1984, she sentenced Ronald Ebens to 25 years in prison for beating 27-year-old Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat outside a Highland Park bar. An appeals court overturned the verdict and Ebens was acquitted at retrial

    In 1984, Taylor banned nativity scenes on municipal property in Birmingham and Dearborn in lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

    That same year, she publicly rebuked then-Chief U.S. District Judge John Feikens for racially insensitive remarks about the ability of Young and other black leaders to run city government. They later became friends.

    Despite her role in numerous high profile cases, Taylor avoided the spotlight and kept a low profile. Perhaps most impressive, say lawyers who appeared before her, was her thoughtful approach in treating defendants. Whether high profile or common folk, they said, she treated everyone with the same respect.

    "She was gracious. She was considerate, and she gave everyone who appeared in front of her respect," said longtime criminal defense attorney Bill Swor, who appeared before Taylor in several cases. "Everyone felt that they had been given a fair hearing, and she genuinely tried to honor the spirit as well as the letter of the law."

    Taylor was born Anna Katherine Johnston in 1932 in Washington, D.C. Her father was treasurer of Howard University. Her mother was a homemaker and a business teacher.

    After the ninth grade, Taylor's parents sent her to Northfield School for Girls in East Northfield, Mass. — one of the few prep schools that accepted black students. She went on to study at the prestigious Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, where she earned a degree in economics in 1954. Three years later, she received a law degree from Yale. She attended on a scholarship and was one of only five women in her graduating class.

    In 1960, she married Charles Diggs Jr., the son of a wealthy Detroit mortician and a rising star in Congress. They moved to Detroit, where she became a Wayne County assistant prosecutor.

    Taylor went to Mississippi in 1964, five months after giving birth to her first child, to defend civil-rights workers who were jailed for registering black people to vote. In 1966, Taylor became an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, but left the following year to manage her husband's Detroit congressional office.

    They were later divorced and Taylor in 1976 married S. Martin Taylor, then director of the Michigan Employment Security Commission.

    Three years later, after she campaigned for Jimmy Carter's presidential bid, Carter rewarded her with a lifetime appointment to U.S. District Court in Detroit, making her the first black female federal district judge in the U.S. 6th Circuit, which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

    Lawyers have described Taylor as fair, pleasant and dignified, yet in firm control of her courtroom.

    "She is smart as hell," one lawyer told the 2006 Almanac of the Federal Judiciary.

    Taylor is survived by her husband, S. Martin Taylor, son Douglass Johnston Diggs, and daughter Carla Diggs Smith, as well as four grandchildren and a brother.

    http://www.freep.com/story/news/2017...ies/836141001/

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