Clarence Thomas

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Clarence Thomas
Current Court Information:
Supreme Court of the United States
Title:   Associate Justice
Service:
Appointed by:   George H.W. Bush
Approval vote:   52-48
Active:   7/1/1991-Current
Preceded by:   Thurgood Marshall
Past post:   District of Columbia Court of Appeals
Past term:   1990-1991
Personal History
Born:   6/23/1948
Home State:   Savannah, GA
Bachelors:   Holy Cross '71 (Worcester, MA)
Law School:   Yale Law '74

Contents

Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American jurist and has been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991. He is the second African American to serve on the nation's highest court, after Justice Thurgood Marshall. Appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Thomas's career in the Supreme Court has seen him take a conservative approach to cases while adhering to the principle of originalism.

Education

Thomas attended high school in Savannah, Georgia, where he was an honors student and the only black person at his school.[1]

Raised Roman Catholic, Justice Thomas considered entering the priesthood at the age of 16, becoming the first-ever black student to attend St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary (Savannah) on the Isle of Hope. He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Catholic seminary in Missouri. Thomas has said that during his first year in seminary he was one of only "three or four" blacks attending the school. Thomas has admitted [2] that he left the seminary after overhearing a student say, in response to the news that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot, "Good, I hope the son of a bitch died."

At a nun's suggestion, Thomas attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Holy Cross, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union and graduated in 1971 with a B.A., cum laude in English literature. A few of Thomas' classmates at Holy Cross were future defense attorney Ted Wells and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones.[3]

Justice Thomas attended Yale Law School from which he received a J.D. degree in 1974.

Legal career

From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri under then State Attorney General John Danforth. When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 to 1979, Thomas left to become an attorney with Monsanto in St. Louis, Missouri. He returned to work for Danforth from 1979 to 1981 as a Legislative Assistant. Both men shared a common bond in that both had studied to be ordained (although Thomas was Roman Catholic and Danforth was ordained Episcopalian). Danforth was to be instrumental in championing Thomas for the Supreme Court.

In 1981, he joined the Reagan administration. From 1981 to 1982, he served as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. From 1982 to 1990 he was Chairman of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC").

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush appointed Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Supreme Court nomination and confirmation

When Justice William Brennan stepped down in 1990, President Bush wanted to nominate Thomas as Brennan's replacement, but felt that replacing Marshall with Thomas would be considered tokenism, as Thomas had not yet had enough experience as a judge after only months on the federal bench. Bush therefore nominated New Hampshire Supreme Court judge David Souter instead.

On July 1, 1991 President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had recently announced his retirement.[4] Marshall had been the only African-American justice on the court.

President Bush said that Thomas was the "best qualified [nominee] at this time."[5] The American Bar Association's (ABA) rating for Judge Thomas was split between "qualified" and "not qualified."

During confirmation hearings, Thomas repeatedly asserted that he had not formulated a position on the Roe decision. Some of the public statements of Thomas's opponents foreshadowed the confirmation fight that would occur. One such statement came from activist Florynce Kennedy at a July 1991 conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Making reference to the failure of Robert Bork's nomination, she said of Thomas, "We're going to 'bork' him."[6] Clarence Thomas's formal confirmation hearings began on September 10, 1991.

Anita Hill allegations

Toward the end of the confirmation hearings, an FBI interview with Anita Hill, an attorney who had worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the EEOC, was leaked. Hill was called to testify at Thomas' confirmation hearings, where she alleged that Thomas had subjected her to inappropriate harassing comments of a sexual nature. Hill's testimony included lurid details, and she was aggressively questioned by some Senators.

Thomas denied the allegations, stating: "This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."[7]

Hill was the only person to testify at the Senate hearings against Thomas. Several witnesses testified on Thomas's behalf. Diane Holt testified that in the years after Hill left for another job, Hill called at least a dozen times. Nancy Altman, who worked with Hill and Thomas at the Department of Education, testified that, "It is not credible that Clarence Thomas could have engaged in the kinds of behavior that Anita Hill alleges, without any of the women who he worked closest with - dozens of us, we could spend days having women come up, his secretaries, his chief of staff, his other assistants, his colleagues - without any of us having sensed, seen or heard something."[8]

After the hearings Senator Arlen Specter said that, "the testimony of Professor Hill in the morning was flat out perjury", and that "she specifically changed it in the afternoon when confronted with the possibility of being contradicted."[9]

After extensive debate, on September 27, the Judiciary Committee split 7-7 and sent the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation. Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with a 52-48 vote on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin for approval in more than a century. [10] The final floor vote was mostly along party lines: 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted to confirm while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject the nomination. On October 23, 1991, Thomas took his seat as the 106th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Notable rulings

Capital Punishment/Death Penalty

Like Scalia, Thomas takes a narrow view of the substantive limitations imposed by the Constitution on the use of capital punishment; he was among the dissenters in both Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons, which held that the Constitution prohibited the application of the death penalty to certain classes of persons. In Kansas v. March, his opinion for the court indicated a belief that the Constitution affords states broad procedural latitude in imposing the death penalty provided they remain within the limits of Furman v. Georgia and Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 case in which the court had reversed its 1972 ban on death sentences as long as states followed certain procedural guidelines.

Executive Powers and Privileges

Thomas has a favorable view toward the power of the executive branch. He was the only justice that agreed with all arguments of the Bush administration in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. He also dissented in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay "violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions...."

External links

References

  1. ↑ Clarence Thomas Speaks Out
  2. ↑ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas visits Conception Seminary College
  3. ↑ Ted Wells, Center Of the Defense, Washington Post
  4. ↑ New York Times
  5. ↑ ABC News: Thomas Memoirs
  6. ↑ Wall Street Journal
  7. ↑ Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court
  8. ↑ Senate judiciary comm. page 590
  9. ↑ Senate judiciary comm. page 230
  10. ↑ Hall, Kermit (ed), The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, page 871, Oxford Press, 1992

Portions of this article have been taken and edited from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Copyright Notice can be found here.

Federal judicial offices
Preceded by:
Robert Bork 		DC Circuit Court of Appeals
1990–1991 		Succeeded by:
Judith Rogers
Preceded by:
Thurgood Marshall 		Supreme Court
1991–present 		Succeeded by:
NA
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