Judge Carlton Reeves is a Mississippi federal judge who compared President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary to tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan during the Jim Crow era while accepting an award at the University of Virginia. Reeves, who is African-American, hit out at Trump’s tweets railing against federal courts and judges while accepting the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law award from his alma mater. “When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political,’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South. When leaders chastise people for merely ‘using the courts,’ you can hear the Citizens Council, hammering up the names of black petitioners in Yazoo City,” Reeves said Thursday. “When lawmakers say ‘we should get rid of judges,’ you can hear segregationist Senators, writing bills to strip courts of their power,” he said. Here’s what you need to know: 1. Carlton Reeves Has Ruled on Some of the Biggest Cases in Mississppi Federal judge removes Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeksMississippi's only abortion clinic sued when Republican Gov. Phil Bryant (right) signed the law March 19, and U.S. Judge Carlton Reeves (left) issued a temporary restraining order. Reeves was appointed to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi by President Barack Obama in 2010. The Mississippi law and the… 2018-11-21T20:57:56.000Z Reeves was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law from the University of Virginia School of Law, which he graduated in 1989, The Clarion-Ledger reported. Past winners include special counsel Bob Mueller, and US Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Antonin Scalia. Reeves has ruled on some of the biggest cases in the state, including his November 2018 decision striking down the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. He also blocked a House bill in 2016 protecting religious objections to same-sex marriage while it was being appealed. He also ruled to dismiss a lawsuit that sought to have Mississippi’s state flag declared unconstitutional because it includes the Stars and Bars emblem of the Confederacy. In a highly publicized 2015 case, Reeves gave an impassioned speech as he sentenced three young white men to prison in the murder of James Craig Anderson, a 48-year-old black man, while yelling “white power.” “In the name of White Power, these young folk went to ‘Jafrica’ to “f–k with some ni–ers!” — echoes of Mississippi’s past. White Power! Ni–er!” he said in a lengthy speech. “In the Mississippi we have tried to bury, when there was a jury verdict for those who perpetrated crimes and committed lynchings in the name of White Power … that verdict typically said that the victim died at the hands of persons unknown. The legal and criminal justice system operated with ruthless efficiency in upholding what these defendants would call White Power.” “Today we take another step away from Mississippi’s tortured past,” he added. “Having learned from Mississippi’s inglorious past, these officials know that in advancing the rule of law, the criminal justice system must operate without regard to race, creed or color. This is the strongest way Mississippi can reject those notions — those ideas which brought us here today.” 2. Reeves Was Appointed by President Obama Federal Judge Strikes Down 'Religious Freedom' LawIn Mississippi, a federal judge struck down that state's controversial "religious freedom" law late Thursday. The law was struck down hours before it was slated to take effect. Known as House Bill 1523, the bill would have made it easier for organizations, individuals, and private associations to deny services based on religious objections. The religious… 2016-07-01T16:46:06.000Z Reeves was nominated to the Southern District of Mississippi by President Obama. He has served on the bench since December 2010. Reeves replaced longtime federal Judge William Henry Barbour Jr. As a teenager, Reeves cleaned Barbour’s courthouse office, NPR reported. Reeves was the in the first class to attend integrated public schools in the state and the first person in his family to attend a four-year college, NPR added. He graduated from Jackson State University before earning his law degree at the University of Virginia, which at the time was 85 percent white. 3. Reeves Slammed Trump’s Tweets Attacking Federal Courts & Judges Defending the Judiciary: A Call for Justice, Truth and Diversity on the BenchU.S. Judge Carlton W. Reeves '89 of the Southern District of Mississippi delivered a defense of the role federal courts play in ensuring justice for marginalized groups throughout the United States. He also argued for the importance of ensuring diversity of backgrounds and perspectives on the federal bench. Reeves gave this lecture in honor of… 2019-04-12T16:41:58.000Z Reeves used his Thursday speech to hit back at Trump’s attacks on federal courts and judges. Trump has repeatedly criticized the judiciary, which has frequently ruled against his administration. “One of the things I appreciate about universities is that we can engage in difficult conversations in more than 280 characters,” Reeves said. After speaking at length about Mississippi’s long history of racism toward African-Americans, Reeves drew a comparison between segregationists and the president. “When lawmakers say ‘we should get rid of judges,’ you can hear segregationist Senators, writing bills to strip courts of their power. And when the Executive Branch calls our courts and their work ‘stupid,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘ridiculous.’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘a laughingstock,’ and a ‘complete and total disgrace,’ you can hear the slurs and threats of executives like George Wallace, echoing into the present,” he said. 4. Reeves Compared Trump’s Attacks to KKK Tactics Neal Katyal: Trump’s Attacks On Roberts ‘Are The Actions Of Authoritarian Govt.’ | MTP Daily | MSNBCConstitutional lawyer Neal Katyal joins MTP Daily to discuss President Trump firing back at Chief Justice Roberts after Roberts criticized Trump for saying a judge who ruled against his migrant asylum order was an "Obama judge." » Subscribe to MSNBC: on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination for in-depth analysis of daily headlines, insightful political… 2018-11-21T23:15:35.000Z Reeves also compared Trump’s attacks on judges to tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan.<doc-sep>Mississippi federal Judge Carlton Reeves in a speech in Virginia assailed the Trump administration for lack of diversity in judicial appointments and likened President Trump's attacks on the judiciary to tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan and segregationists in the Jim Crow era. Reeves, who has ruled on some of the state’s biggest legal cases, spoke Thursday at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he accepted this year's Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law award from his alma mater. Reeves' law clerk Chelsea Caveny Lewis said Friday that the judge will not make any further comment beyond the speech. BuzzFeed News reports Reeves, an African American, quoted President Donald Trump's tweets and public comments about judges and the courts (the written version obtained by BuzzFeed includes footnotes making clear Reeves is referring to Trump tweets) and blasted the lack of diversity among Trump's judicial nominees. "When politicians attack courts as 'dangerous,' 'political,' and guilty of 'egregious overreach,' you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South. When leaders chastise people for merely 'using the courts,' you can hear the Citizens Council, hammering up the names of black petitioners in Yazoo City," Reeves said, quoting Trump. "When the powerful accuse courts of 'opening up our country to potential terrorists,' you can hear the Southern Manifesto’s authors, smearing the judiciary for simply upholding the rights of black folk. When lawmakers say 'we should get rid of judges,' you can hear segregationist Senators, writing bills to strip courts of their power," Reeves said. Reeves said in his 16-page speech with 130 footnotes that a false seed is being sown across the country, from Mississippi to Virginia, “I know, because I am there," Reeves said. “The proof is in my mailbox. In countless letters of hatred I’ve been called ‘piece of garbage,’ ‘an arrogant pompous piece of s…, ‘a disgrace,’ an ‘asshole…(who) will burn in hell,’ and the ‘embodiment of Satan himself. '” Reeves has ruled on some of the state’s high-profile cases including in November when he struck down a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks. In addition to the abortion ruling, Reeves in 2016 blocked House Bill 1523 from going into effect during an appeal. The law protects religious objections to same-sex marriage. Reeves also received national recognition for his speech during the sentencing of three young white men in the 2011 hate crime death of James Craig Anderson, a black man run down on Ellis Avenue in Jackson. Reeves, a native of Yazoo City, has been a U.S. District Court judge of the Southern District of Mississippi since 2010. Reeves was nominated to the post by former President Barack Obama. Reeves said the deliverers of hate who send such messages aim to bully and scare judges who look like him from the judiciary. There is no excuse for the exclusion of minority experiences from courts, Reeves said. He said presidents from Nixon to Reagan to Bush have proven that Republican administrations have no trouble finding women and people of color with suitable judicial philosophies. “Justice (Sonia) Sotomayor was originally a George H.W. Bush appointee. And the last Republican administration confirmed 24 black judges,” Reeves said. “This administration has confirmed one.” More:Judge: HB 1523 violates religious neutrality, equal protection More:He's ruled on some of Mississippi's biggest cases. Now, Judge Carlton Reeves is a Thomas Jefferson law honoree Contact Jimmie E. Gates at 601-961-7212 or jgates@gannett.com. Follow @jgatesnews on Twitter.<doc-sep>Yesterday, the University of Virginia law school awarded Mississippi federal district judge (and UVA law alumnus) Carlton W. Reeves its Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law. In his acceptance speech, which opens with a moving discussion of the “complication[s]” involved in a black judge’s receiving an award named after Thomas Jefferson, Judge Reeves addresses what he calls the three “great assault[s]” on the federal judiciary. Advertisement The first great assault came during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, when “the Klan responded to the threat of democratic justice by trying to assassinate black judges, shooting black jurors, and murdering federal court officers.” Reeves presents a powerful summary of the terrible suffering and injustice that blacks in the South endured. The “second great pushback against the judiciary” was triggered by the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. “White power returned to the playbook of the past: smearing judges, shrinking judicial power, and scrubbing diversity from courtrooms.” Reeves provides a poignant account of the education and opportunities he received when that pushback failed. According to Reeves, “We are now eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary.” By his account, that assault consists, first and foremost, of various tweets and comments by Donald Trump, both as candidate and as president, slamming various judges and rulings. But you can believe, as I do, that many of those tweets and comments were deplorable without seeing in them anything remotely like the return of the Klan. And you can likewise lament, as I do, that Reeves has received a lot of vicious mail without concluding that the “deliverers of hate who send these messages aim to bully and scare judges who look like me from the judiciary.” (Reeves’s judicial grandstanding on abortion and marriage provide ample non-race-based reasons for people to be upset with him, though that is certainly no excuse for vicious messages.) Advertisement Another part of this “third great assault,” Reeves tells us, is the lack of racial and gender diversity in President Trump’s judicial picks. The subtitle of Reeves’s speech—“A Call for Justice, Truth, and Diversity on the Bench”—conveys the absolute value that he assigns to diversity. His talk of “[a]chieving complete gender equality on the federal bench” displays his quota mentality. He also misuses Madison when he quotes him, in Federalist No. 39, as “caution[ing] that it was ‘essential’ a democracy’s officials ‘be derived from the great body of the society.’” Madison was of course talking about the House of Representatives, not the judiciary. Previous Republican presidents, Reeves contends, have “had no trouble finding women and people of color with suitable judicial philosophies.” After all, “Justice Sotomayor was originally a George H.W. Bush appointee.” Reeves somehow misses that this example illustrates the very opposite of what he intends: In a deal with New York senators, Bush nominated Sotomayor despite grave White House concerns about her judicial philosophy. More generally, I sure wish that those who seem to imagine that lots of blacks and women “with suitable judicial philosophies” are being passed over would offer up some names of interested candidates. I’m also not sure how it’s proper for a federal judge to be criticizing a president’s judicial picks. But Reeves goes even further. In faulting judicial nominees for refusing to address whether Brown v. Board of Education was rightly decided, he supports Senate Democrats’ smear game. In a stealth slam of the five conservative justices, he cites Justice Kagan’s recent dissent in a death-penalty case (which I discussed here) for the proposition that “injustice happens when courts place expediency and finality ahead of truth.” He also faults the Supreme Court for its own “narrow set of perspectives” and even wonders “What Dred Scotts and Plessys will be handed down” by it.<doc-sep>A black federal judge in Mississippi delivered an impassioned speech against historical, race-based “assaults” on the judiciary, saying that such attacks are still going on in the present day. District Judge Carlton Reeves spoke about this while accepting the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law on Thursday at the University of Virginia School of Law. He did not hold back, citing many of President Donald Trump‘s tweets and comments to illustrate his belief the the country is at risk the way it was during the days of segregation and the KKK. Reeves, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2010, recalled how the lack of diversity in America’s past led to troubling decisions like the Dred Scott case, and how “courts were led to falsehood” because they lacked “the black experience.” When this started to change, there was a pushback. “In Mississippi and across the South, the Klan responded to the threat of democratic justice by trying to assassinate black judges, shooting black jurors, and murdering federal court officers,” Reeves recalled, pointing out that the Klan’s plan worked. “The great assault on the judiciary succeeded. Black perspectives were again banished from our courts, especially in my Mississippi. But barren of the experience of a majority of its citizens, our courts saw only a disfigured growth, like a tree raised with water but not light,” he said. That resulted in the “tree” yielding “strange fruit” like the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision that allowed segregation. With segregation came another pushback, Reeves said. “White power returned to the playbook of the past: smearing judges, shrinking judicial power, and scrubbing diversity from courtrooms,” he said, mentioning lawmakers like John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace, who attacked the federal judicial system by denigrating the federal court system, and the “massive resistance” of the Southern Manifesto of 1956 that criticized racial integration. “Black folks across the country who had the gall to ask for justice were interrogated, tracked, beaten, jailed, bombed, and murdered,” Reeves recalled, “sometimes by officers of justice themselves, the police. Judges who sought to deliver justice faced an ‘onslaught’ of death threats and hate mail. Their pets were poisoned. Their children’s graves were desecrated.” While the country–and the judiciary–enjoyed progress after this period, Reeves said that things have taken another turn for the worse. “We are now eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary,” he said, pointing to President Trump’s tweets and other remarks about judges, specifically his comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Trump claimed that Judge Curiel would be biased against him because he’s of Mexican descent (he was born in the U.S.) and because Trump has called for a wall at the Mexican border. “I know what I heard when a federal judge was called ‘very biased and unfair’ because he is ‘of Mexican heritage,'” he said. “When that judge’s ethnicity was said to prevent his issuing ‘fair rulings.’ When that judge was called a ‘hater’ simply because he is Latino. I heard the words of James Eastland, a race-baiting politician, empowered by the falsehood of white supremacy, questioning the judicial temperament of a man solely because of the color of his skin. I heard those words and I did not know if it was 1967 or 2017.” He then quoted language from a number of tweets, which were cited via footnotes in the published version of the speech. “And when the Executive Branch calls our courts and their work ‘stupid,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘a laughingstock,’ and a ‘complete and total disgrace,’ you can hear the slurs and threats of executives like George Wallace, echoing into the present,” he said. In addition to the president’s past remarks, however, the current demographics of Trump’s judicial picks have been problematic, Reeves claimed. “Of the Article III judges confirmed under the current Administration, 90% have been white. Just one of those judges is black. Just two are Hispanic,” he noted. He said that’s no accident, either. “This Administration and a bare majority of the Senate, walking arm-and-arm, are not stumbling unaware towards a homogeneous judiciary,” he concluded. [Image via Millsaps College screengrab] Have a tip we should know? [email protected]<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — In a highly unusual public rebuke against President Donald Trump by a sitting member of the federal judiciary, US District Judge Carlton Reeves delivered a speech Thursday calling the Trump administration a "great assault on our judiciary" and comparing the president's criticism of the judiciary to tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan and segregationists. According to a copy of the speech obtained by BuzzFeed News, Reeves, who is black and sits in Jackson, Mississippi, extensively quoted Trump's tweets and public comments about judges and the courts (the written version includes footnotes making clear who and what Reeves is referring to) and blasted the lack of diversity among Trump's judicial nominees. "When politicians attack courts as 'dangerous,' 'political,' and guilty of 'egregious overreach,' you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South. When leaders chastise people for merely 'us[ing] the courts,' you can hear the Citizens Council, hammering up the names of black petitioners in Yazoo City, [Mississippi]," Reeves said, quoting Trump. "When the powerful accuse courts of 'open[ing] up our country to potential terrorists,' you can hear the Southern Manifesto’s authors, smearing the judiciary for simply upholding the rights of black folk. When lawmakers say 'we should get rid of judges,' you can hear segregationist senators, writing bills to strip courts of their power." Reeves spoke at the University of Virginia School of Law, his alma mater, where he received the school's Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law. He said there was "no excuse" for the "exclusion" of minorities from the courts, pointing to the fact that only a handful of Trump's nominees to date were people of color and that a small proportion were women. He cited examples of three Trump nominees — none of whom were ultimately confirmed — who made inflammatory comments in the past about race, diversity, and transgender children. "This Administration and a bare majority of the Senate, walking arm-and-arm, are not stumbling unaware towards a homogeneous judiciary," Reeves said. He called on other judges to "do more to defend our bench." "Judges, politicians, and citizens alike must denounce attacks that undermine our ability to do justice. It is not enough for judges, seeing race-based attacks on their brethren, to say they are merely 'disheartened,' or to simply affirm their nonpartisan status," Reeves said, citing responses by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., respectively, to comments by Trump. The judge was also critical of Trump nominees who have refused to say at their confirmation hearings that the US Supreme Court's seminal desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, was correctly decided. Democrats have repeatedly raised the question at hearings — they've also asked a similar version of the question about Roe v. Wade — and most nominees have replied either that they did not think it was appropriate to comment on the correctness of any US Supreme Court precedent, or that all current Supreme Court precedent is correct. "Think of the pattern of judicial nominees refusing to admit, like generations of nominees before them have, that Brown v. Board was correctly decided. That same Brown, which led to Alexander v. Holmes County [Board of Education], which breathed justice into the segregated streets of my Yazoo City," Reeves said. "As if equality was a mere political position." Reeves, who was confirmed in 2010, is no stranger to the spotlight. He's presided over a number of high-profile cases. In November, he blocked Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, writing that it was "unequivocally" unconstitutional. He's publicly criticized the lack of diversity on the federal bench before, and issued rulings in other cases that received national attention — for instance, a lengthy speech he delivered at the 2015 sentencing hearing for three white men charged with killing a black man that traced the history of racism in Mississippi. But while federal judges have routinely blocked the Trump administration's policies in court, none have publicly criticized the president in such a direct way since he took office. Judicial ethics rules limit what judges can say in public about current affairs and how much they can wade into the political fray. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg faced a backlash when she criticized Trump, then a presidential candidate, in the summer of 2016, and she eventually apologized. Reeves's criticism of the president was no off-the-cuff comment.