Trump-Critic Judge Reeves at Center of Abortion, Voting Cases

The federal judge who made headlines with his criticism of President Donald Trump also played a key role in ongoing, high-profile cases involving abortion and voting rights.

Judge Carlton Reeves also hasn’t shied away from giving strongly worded opinions since President Barack Obama appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

For instance, NPR described a “breathtaking speech” by Reeves recounting the history of lynchings in the state, which he gave to three white men involved in the killing of a black man who was beaten by a group and run over by a truck.

“A toxic mix of alcohol, foolishness and unadulterated hatred caused these young people to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs from the Mississippi we long to forget,” Reeves said at a 2015 sentencing, according to NPR.

In an address last week at the University of Virginia, where he went to law school, Reeves compared Trump’s description of courts as “dangerous” and “political” to the acts of Ku Klux Klan attorneys “assailing officers of the court across the South.”

Reeves, who is black, also took aim at Trump judicial nominees who refused to say that the landmark civil rights decision of Brown v.Board of Education was correctly decided.

Further, he criticized the Trump administration for a lack of racial and gender diversity in its judicial nominees. Most are white and male.

It’s rare for a sitting federal judge to criticize a president publicly, but Trump has generated controversy with his own criticisms of the judiciary which haven’t been unanswered.

Trump commented before becoming president that a judge in California couldn’t be impartial because he’s Hispanic. And when Trump questioned the independence of what he called “an Obama judge” last year, Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stepped up to defended the judiciary. Trump has also derided the California-based Ninth Circuit.

Voting Rights, Abortion

Reeves is a former federal prosecutor and partner at Pigott Reeves Johnson in Jackson. In two notable rulings since taking the bench, he struck down Mississippi’s abortion ban and found that a state district violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting black votes.

Invalidating Mississippi’s ban on abortions of fetuses older than 15 weeks in Jackson Women’s Health Org. v. Currier, Reeves said the prohibition violated the right to have an abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade.

The state argued that the ban didn’t put an undue burden on that right and that it was passed to further its interest in protecting the health of women.

But that professed interest was “pure gaslighting,” Reeves concluded.

The “real reason we are here is simple,” Reeves said. “The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe.”

The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief Friday arguing that the ban is unconstitutional.

Reeves was a member of the ACLU of Mississippi, a civil rights organization, from 1993 to 2009, and he weighed in on a civil rights dispute involving a state voting district.

In February, he found that the district’s boundaries diluted the voting strength of blacks in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

He ordered the adoption of a redistricting plan submitted by the plaintiffs challenging the districts. The plaintiffs included a black state senate candidate who lost in 2015.

The Fifth Circuit granted a partial stay of the order in March, so that the state could have time to remedy the violation.