Judge Newman Fully Capable to Serve, New Physician Report Says

Lawyers for 97-year-old Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman on Tuesday released a 44-page report from a neurosurgeon who concluded the suspended jurist is “fully capable to engage in the work of a judge.”

The report, posted Tuesday afternoon to the website of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents Newman, is authored by Aaron Filler, a California-based physician who is also an inventor and lawyer licensed to practice before the influential US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It responds to separate rounds of suspensions handed down by the court’s Judicial Council after Newman refused to undergo a full neurological examination with an independent physician.

Newman has previously highlighted exams she’s gotten from doctors who have given her clean bills of health, though her colleagues have questioned the independence and sufficiency of those tests. The first report came from Ted Rothstein, whom the Judicial Council noted had a “long-time personal relationship with Judge Newman.” A second medical report came from Regina Carney, who the council said “was classmates in medical school” with the NCLA lawyer representing Newman in a federal lawsuit challenging her suspension.

The new report emphasizes the use of brain scans—specifically, Perfusion Computed Tomography—in examining the judge. Several pages of the report posted on the NCLA website were partially or fully redacted.

Unlike a situation in litigation where dueling medical experts might quibble over a factual disputed, “there is no ‘defense CT scan’ and ‘plaintiff CT scan’ because the data is completely objective requiring little if any subjective interpretation,” the report said.

Filler also said he compared Newman’s “verbal and analytical abilities during my examination to my prior interactions with her as an attorney who appeared before her on two separate occasions in 2019 and 2022.” He wrote that the examination took about three hours.

Filler won the first of the two appeals in which Newman was a panelist, a case involving a patent covering magnetic resonance imaging technology that the doctor and his company was asserting. Filler’s second appeal was unsuccessful.

“In my expert professional opinion, and to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, based on the combined test results there is no evidence that Judge Newman suffers from any cognitive impairment, and she is fully able to discharge the duties of her office,” Filler said.

The Federal Circuit’s Judicial Committee didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the new report.