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Sherrilyn Ifill

November 19, 2012
Leading Civil Rights Attorney and Law Prof. Sherrilyn Ifill to Head NAACP LDF
by Jeremy Leaming

One of the nation’s preeminent civil and human rights groups, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), tapped as its new leader one of the nation’s foremost civil rights attorneys and scholars Sherrilyn Ifill. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall helped found LDF in 1940 and led the battle in its first couple of decades to end segregation of the public schools.

Ifill (pictured), a frequent ACS participant, who has also occasionally provided guest posts for ACSblog, will be LDF’s next president and director-counsel in January. She is also a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law, and as The Root notes is “no stranger to LDF’s work.”

The Root continues:

Early in her career, before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law, authoring On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, and making a name for herself as a respected civil rights strategist, she served as assistant counsel in LDF’s New York office. There, she litigated voting rights cases, including the landmark Voting Rights Act case Houston Lawyers' Association vs. Attorney General of Texas.

In March, LDF’s sixth Director-Counsel and President John Payton died. Payton, like his predecessors at LDF, was also a tireless advocate for civil liberties and human rights. In a tribute piece to Payton, ACS Board member and former LDF Director-Counsel and President Theodore M. Shaw said Payton’s “advocacy on behalf of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the excluded reached beyond the United States. He worked against the apartheid in South Africa, and traveled around the world in support of rights.”

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Civil rights, Election law, Voting rights, Racial justice, Democracy and Voting, Equality and Liberty, NAACP LDF, Sec. 5, Shelby County v. Holder, Sherrilyn Ifill, voter ID laws, voter suppression, Voting Rights Act
November 17, 2010
Flouting the Rule of Law: Prof. Ifill Examines a Troubling Pattern
Top officials of the George W. Bush administration, including Bush himself, have loudly, and often, proclaimed their approval of interrogation methods of military detainees that under international and domestic law amount to torture, and their actions undermine the nation's supposed commitment to the rule of law, writes University of Maryland law school professor Sherrilyn Ifill.
In an article for The Root, Ifill notes that during recent promotion of his book, Decision Points, Bush says he had no problem approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush writes that when asked by the CIA whether it could use waterboarding in its interrogations of Mohammed, he replied "Damn right."

President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and international legal experts, The Washington Post reports, have all condemned waterboarding as torture. But, Ifill writes, Bush and many of other officials from his administration have continued to proclaim their support of waterboarding, and attack the Obama administration on its national security policies.

But more troubling than the political consequences surrounding the matter is that too many Americans apparently don't see a problem. Ifill notes that "no one in the upper command structure or cabinet of the Bush administration has been criminally or civilly punished ...," Ifill writes. "This is what impunity looks like," she adds.

Ifill continues:

The line on torture, on detainee treatment, on disclosures to Congress and the public, has never been reset. As Bush and Yoo [John Yoo, former attorney in the Bush administration, who wrote memoranda, which have been widely criticized for offering shoddy legal analysis, supporting the use of torture in interrogations] chat with Oprah and appear on talk shows touting their books, and waterboarding becomes the stuff of late-night jokes, Americans may no longer even know or care what constitutes illegal conduct during war.

Jon Stewart condemns those who call Bush a war criminal as equivalent to those who compare Obama to Hitler, without recognizing the critical difference between the two. Responsible and experienced lawyers believe - based on fact and standards set out in the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and our own domestic anti-torture statute - that former President Bush may in fact be a war criminal. Likening President Obama to Hitler, on the other hand, is ugly, irresponsible name-calling.

Ifill also notes an opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft, which allowed a legal action accusing former Attorney General John Ashcroft of implementing a policy of mass incarceration after the Sept. 11 attacks of American Muslims that resulted in an illegal arrest and detention to proceed. "There's little disagreement among court watchers," Ifill writes, "that the Supreme Court took this case for the same reason it hears most of the other petitions from the 9th Circuit: to reverse the decisions of that more moderate appeals court. Once again, illegal conduct has taken place, and yet those who gave the order may avoid responsibility."

[image via Marion Doss]

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Supreme Court, Criminal Justice, Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft, George W. Bush, John Yoo, Sherrilyn Ifill, Torture
October 25, 2010
More Than Just He Said/She Said
Guest Post
By Sherrilyn Ifill, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law
Last week, most of the mainstream media seemed anxious to move on from the story of Virginia Thomas' bizarre early morning phone call to the office of Professor Anita Hill, in which she invited Hill to apologize to Thomas for "what you did with my husband." But The Washington Post's subsequent, explosive interview with Clarence Thomas' former girlfriend who has corroborated much of Anita Hill's 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, has laid to rest the idea that this story is over. And indeed this episode is deserving of more attention. It's important because there are so many people who have no real memory of the Thomas confirmation hearings, or why they were so important. In their attempt to get past addressing Mrs. Thomas' bewildering conduct, some media outlets had dismissed the Thomas hearings as a mere "he said/she said" exchange of accusations. In fact, the Thomas hearings - both before and after the statements raised by Anita Hill were made public - constituted an important watershed moment in confirmation hearings, in our understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace, and even in our racial discourse. The temptation by the media to treat this as a non-story or to minimize its significance should be resisted.
And in fact that's part of the story. Perhaps in part because the Thomas hearings were so painful, so ugly, so disturbing, Justice Thomas is often given a pass by the press. Some of his most inflammatory decisions on the Court - often in concurrence or dissent - are rarely remarked on by Supreme Court writers and bloggers. As I've suggested, even the problematic nature of some of Mrs. Thomas' political activities have been soft-pedaled by court watchers. But we should not soft-pedal history. These were the hearings at which Thomas assured the Committee that once confirmed he would hold no allegiance to the conservative views he'd advanced as a conservative darling and former member of the Reagan Administration. Long before Chief Justice John Roberts promoted the image of the "umpire" judge who just "calls balls and strikes," Thomas introduced us to another empty sports metaphor - promising that he would "strip down like a runner" and shed his earlier ideological views to be an impartial justice. Thomas also sought to reassure the Judiciary Committee and the public, that despite his earlier harsh words about civil rights leaders, and his own less than stellar stewardship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), that he felt empathy (yes, empathy) for those less fortunate. He insisted that when from his office he could see a bus of prisoners in Washington, D.C., he felt, "there but for the grace of God, go I."

But it was the hearings after Anita Hill's statements came to light that truly riveted the nation. Hill had worked for Thomas at the EEOC. Both were conservatives. Thomas had been serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for little over a year when he was tapped by President George H.W. Bush who implausibly called the unremarkable Thomas, the "best candidate" for the job.

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Supreme Court, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Anita Hill, Ginni Thomas, Guest Post, Justice Clarence Thomas, Sherrilyn Ifill, Virginia Thomas
October 12, 2010
Why We Ignored the Supreme Court’s Review of Connick v. Thompson
Guest Post
By Sherrilyn Ifill, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law

There's a story to be told from the intense media focus on last week's Snyder v. Phelps case in the Supreme Court. To be sure, the case - involving a challenge by the father of a slain serviceman to protests conducted by a fringe religious organization at his son's funeral - is an important one in which the Court may provide importance guidance on the reach of the First Amendment. The protests at the military funerals, in which followers of the Westboro Baptist "church," hold up signs that celebrate the death of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Westboro members regard as a punishment for what they believe is U.S. tolerance of gays in the military - are repulsive by almost any sane standard. Given the lurid facts of the case, and the tension between our sympathy for Alfred Snyder and our traditional robust protection of even repulsive speech under the First Amendment, it's perhaps not surprising that almost every major news outlet and Supreme Court blog reported on last Thursday's oral argument.

But it's telling that on the same day Snyder was argued, the Court also heard oral argument in Connick v. Thompson - a case with considerably more concrete implications for the lives of thousands of criminal defendants. In Connick, the Court will decide whether a man who was convicted of capital murder and held in solitary confinement on death row for 14 years can hold a prosecutor's office civilly liable for violating his constitutional rights by withholding exculpatory evidence from defense counsel and failing to train prosecutors in their obligation to furnish this information to defense counsel. The obligation of prosecutors to turn over such evidence to defense counsel was first established by the Supreme Court in 1963. But the New Orleans district attorney's office argues in Connick that it cannot be held liable for a single incident of violating Brady. Instead, the prosecutor argues that they can only be held liable if it is demonstrated that they engaged in a pattern of withholding such evidence. In other words, only if we repeatedly violated the Constitution can we be compelled to pay for allowing an innocent man to be imprisoned and almost executed.

With the exception of an article I wrote for The Root, and an in-depth treatment by John Hollway in SLATE, (Hollway's book on the Thompson case has just been released) the oral argument in Connick escaped media and Supreme Court blog attention. And this is its own story. Connick (like last year's Pottawattamie, IA v. McGhee case) is a case that peels back the cover on an aspect of the criminal justice system that is too little examined in the mainstream media, and is unfortunately too well-known to many African Americans. The willingness of some prosecutors to withhold evidence that would likely exculpate criminal defendants, or as in the Pottawattamie case, to deliberately fabricate evidence to frame criminal suspects is a reality of our criminal justice system. The fact that these instances are rare compared to the thousands of cases in which prosecutors act ethically, makes them no less corrosive of public confidence in our justice system. That the victims of this kind of misconduct are often African Americans adds yet another layer of ugliness that further complicates the public response. Unfortunately, it may also explain why these stories - even when they make it to the Supreme Court - get so little attention. When the victims are prominent and white - as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team members accused of rape - prosecutorial misconduct makes an intense, but still too-brief appearance on the front pages of our newspapers.

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Legal services, Supreme Court, Criminal Justice, Connick v. Thompson, Guest Post, John Thompson, prosecutorial misconduct, Sherrilyn Ifill
August 12, 2010
Prof. Ifill Examines Challenges to Judge Walker’s Impartiality in Prop. 8 Case
Religious Right activists' arguments that U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who issued the recent decision striking California's anti-gay marriage law, Proposition 8, is unfit to hear the case because of his sexual orientation are reminiscent of the arguments challenging "the impartiality of black judges presiding over civil rights cases 30 years ago," writes Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill for The Root.
Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, notes that the Family Research Council and the American Family Association have both issued missives arguing that Judge Walker should recuse himself because of some "published reports" that he is gay. "This is an ugly and desperate charge - among the worst one can make against a judge: that he allowed his personal interests to dictate the outcome of a case. It should be answered swiftly and decisively, because the implications of this charge extend far beyond the Prop. 8 case," Ifill says.

Ifill continues:

Rumors about Judge Walker's sexual orientation were well-known to attorneys for the state of California long before the trial concerning Prop. 8. Why, then, didn't the State of California file a motion seeking the recusal of Judge Walker? The simple reason is that Judge Walker's sexual orientation - whether gay or straight - is not an appropriate basis for a recusal motion. In fact, suggestions that Judge Walker's sexual orientation is evidence of bias is the kind of argument that was firmly discredited in a series of cases challenging the impartiality of black judges to decide civil rights cases.

...

In perhaps the most famous of these cases, lawyers representing the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell requested that federal district judge Constance Baker Motley recuse herself from hearing a case brought by women lawyers at the firm who charged discrimination in hiring and promotion. The law firm's motion for recusal was based on Judge Motley's status as a black woman and her professional experience as a former civil rights lawyer. The late Judge Motley is most famously known as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) lawyer who litigated nearly all of the cases seeking to desegregate universities throughout the South. [The ACS annual moot court competition is named after Motley - the Constance Baker Motley National Moot Court Competition in Constitutional Law.] She represented James Meredith in his contentious and ultimately successful battle for admission to the University of Mississippi. After leaving the LDF, she served at a New York assemblywoman and as borough president of Manhattan.

When the recusal motion was brought against her in 1975 in the law firm case, Motley refused to withdraw from presiding over the case, offering the now classic explanation that "if background or sex or race of each judge were, by definition, sufficient grounds for removal, no judge on this court could hear this case, or many others, by virtue of the fact that all of them were attorneys, of a sex, often with distinguished law firm or public service backgrounds."

Ifill's entire piece is available here. See here for additional information about Judge Walker's decision in the Prop. 8 case.

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LGBT issues, Equality and Liberty, Judge Vaughn Walker, marriage equality, Proposition 8, Sherrilyn Ifill