Federal Judge Appears To Be Holding A Sexist Grudge In His Courtroom
This seems way out of line.
Judge Lynn Hughes
The last time I wrote about Judge Lynn Hughes, a district court judge in the Southern District of Texas, I said, “F this guy.” And you know what? Nothing has changed.
So Judge Hughes has a long history of saying inappropriate things in court. But his most recent ATL appearance is actually relevant to this story. It was back in July when the Fifth Circuit decided to benchslap Hughes for some pretty inappropriate and sexist comments. During the course of a hearing, Hughes seemingly attributed a female prosecutor’s mistake to the fact that she’s a “girl”:
“It was a lot simpler when you guys wore dark suits white shirts and navy ties . . . we didn’t let girls do it in the old days.”
Judge Hughes’s defense of the comments was that he was speaking to the FBI agents in the room, not the female prosecutor. (Spoiler alert: the comments are still sexist.) But as the Fifth Circuit noted in its opinion, it doesn’t really matter who they were directed at:
And in a footnote, Judge Edith Brown Clement pointed out that [the defendant’s] lawyer contended during oral argument that “the record is ambiguous and perhaps the district court was speaking not to prosecutors, but to other women present at the hearing.”
“Regardless, such comments are demeaning, inappropriate and beneath the dignity of a federal judge,” Clement wrote in the footnote.
Turns out Judge Hughes’s is sticking to that excuse, and making one attorney’s life miserable in the process.
The female prosecutor in the previous case was Tina Ansari. Since the Fifth Circuit bench slapped Hughes over the comments, she hasn’t been able to appear in Hughes’s court. Yup, that’s right, on the two occasions Ansari was supposed to appear in Judge Hughes’s courtroom, he excused her from the cases. As reported by the Houston Chronicle:
The next time Ansari appeared before Hughes was on Jan. 14, as one of two prosecuting attorneys for an unrelated criminal case. At the pretrial hearing, Ansari announced her name to the court reporter and Hughes promptly excused her from court. She packed up and left.
Four days later at the start of a subsequent hearing on the same health care fraud case, Hughes immediately excused Ansari again.
She asked why, and judge declined to provide his rationale.
Ansari thanked Hughes and left the courtroom.
U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick asked Judge Hughes why he refused to allow Ansari practice in his courtroom and apparently it all circles back to the appellate brief filed that describes Judge Hughes’s sexist comments:
Hughes responded that Patrick had failed to withdraw a “dishonest brief” in the 2017 case that the judge said incorrectly quoted him as making the “girls” remarks to Ansari. Hughes said that in the past prosecutors have corrected mistakes when the court pointed them out, and Hughes claimed that Patrick and his staff had not followed suit.
The judge explained, “Ms. Ansari is not welcome here because her ability and integrity are inadequate,” according to a transcript.
Whaaaa?
You know what, I’m going to double down on my initial assessment: F this guy. But let’s delve deeper than my cheeky response. The Chronicle also spoke with some legal ethics experts including University of Pittsburgh law professor Arthur Hellman:
[Hellman] reviewed portions of the transcript and said Hughes’ behavior “seems to be erratic in a way that starts to raise some questions about his competence.”
Hellman said it was bizarre for a judge to be “jumping into the case in this way and deciding this particular (prosecutor) … isn’t competent to represent the U.S. when the U.S. Attorney who runs the office thinks she is.”
Given Hughes’ history as the subject of a previous formal complaint and of public criticism in past appellate court opinions, Hellman said, “I think that the overall pattern of behavior here is sufficient to justify the chief judge initiating a complaint under the misconduct act.”
We can only hope something is finally done about Judge Hughes’s behavior in court.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
