Читать книгу Texas Confidential - Michael Varhola - Страница 19

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, U.S. DISTRICT Court Judge Samuel B. Kent was exceptional among jurists not just in Texas but in the country overall and is notable for having made legal history in a number of ways. Unfortunately, the most significant way was becoming the first federal judge to be charged in federal court with sex crimes.

“Your wrongful conduct is a huge black X,” said Judge Roger Vinson to Kent when sentencing him to nearly three years in prison for a variety of charges related to a decade of his sexual predation, boozing, and cronyism. “ … a stain on the judicial system itself, a matter of concern in the federal courts.”

After being nominated by President George H.W. Bush on August 3, 1990, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate the following month, Kent became the sole judge presiding over the Galveston Division of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas on October 1, 1990. This broad jurisdiction covered the coastal Texas counties of Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, and Matagorda.

Hints of Kent’s legal downfall emerged in 2001, when the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Texas reassigned eighty-five of his cases because they were being handled by an attorney, Richard Melancon, who was a close personal friend of the rogue judge.

Six years later, in August 2007, an even more ominous hint of things to come occurred when the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Texas ordered that Kent would not be hearing any cases from September 2007 until January 2008. During this period of suspension—hardly an uncommon situation for judges—Kent did not perform any official duties, his cases all being parceled out to other judges, but continued to draw his substantial annual salary of $169,300. And what started out as a four-month leave of absence ultimately turned into a permanent hiatus from the bench.

In late December of 2007, the Fifth Circuit announced that there was an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice into allegations of sexual misconduct that had been made against Judge Kent by his former case manager, Cathy McBroom, and secretary, Donna Wilkerson. The following month he was transferred to the Houston division of the Southern District of Texas.

Donna Wilkerson, the secretary of the dishonorable Samuel B. Kent, is shown here testifying before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Judicial Impeachment on June 5, 2009.

Near the end of August 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Kent on three counts of attempted aggravated sexual abuse and abusive sexual contact, all related to the complaints of misconduct that had been made against him the previous year. Kent made his mark with these charges, becoming the first federal judge to be arraigned in federal court for sex crimes.

As it turned out, he had been involved in even more sex crimes than was initially apparent, and in January of 2009 the grand jury indicted him on three additional charges: abusive sexual contact, aggravated sexual abuse, and, naturally, obstruction of justice.

Perhaps as a result of having greater-than-usual insights into the judicial process, Kent took steps to keep it from moving forward, and on February 23, 2009—the day that jury selection was set to start—he agreed to retire as judge and pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice for lying to the judicial committee investigating the allegations against him. He also admitted to nonconsensual sexual contact between 2003 and 2007 with the two women who worked for him.

Despite his generous offer to retire, however—which would have entitled him to draw his hefty paycheck for life—it was by no means clear whether he could be permitted to do so; the minimum age of retirement for a federal judge was sixty-five and, at the time, Kent was just fifty-nine. One exception to this age requirement applied to judges who had become permanently disabled while performing their duties, and the increasingly and infuriatingly cute Kent claimed that applied to him—as a result of defending himself against the charges leveled against him!

In order to have this claim recognized, Kent needed to receive certification from the Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit that he was, indeed, disabled, and then petition the President of the United States to honor it. In May 2009, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied Kent’s request for disability status and instead recommended that he be impeached.

“A claimant should not profit from his own wrongdoing by engaging in criminal misconduct and then collecting a federal retirement salary for the disability related to the prosecution,” wrote Chief Judge Edith Jones, who furthermore observed that Kent did not appear to actually be in any way disabled.

On May 11, Kent was sentenced to thirty-three months in federal prison on the charge of obstructing justice in the investigation of sexual abuse accusations (the former charge alone might have gotten him a full twenty years in the pen). On June 15, the ostensibly disabled Kent reported to the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, to begin serving his sentence (although in November of that year he was moved to a state prison in Florida). He was also ordered to participate in an alcohol-abuse program and to pay a $1,000 fine and a total of $6,550 in restitution to his two victims.

The leaders of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressmen Lamar Smith of Texas (R) and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan (D) also demanded that Kent resign immediately or face impeachment. Kent responded by submitting his resignation on June 2, 2009—but with the proviso that it would not take effect for a full year! This enraged the members of the committee, and eight days later they unanimously voted to send articles of impeachment to the full House of Representatives. On June 19, the legislature passed these articles, making Kent the first federal judge to be impeached in twenty years.

On June 25, Senate officials traveled to the Massachusetts penal facility where Kent was being held in order to serve him with the formal summons to his impeachment trial, and when they arrived, he presented them with a new letter of resignation, this one bearing an effective date of June 30. President Barack Obama accepted Kent’s resignation on the day it became effective, and on July 20 the House of Representatives requested that the Senate end Kent’s trial, which two days later it agreed to do.

Upon his resignation taking effect, Kent ceased to draw the salary that he had maneuvered to keep following his downfall as a judge.