Joyce Hens Green, a pioneering federal judge, dies

The daughter of Swiss immigrants, Judge Green began her legal career in 1951 after graduating as one of six women from George Washington University Law School. At the time, she said, it was so rare for women to be practicing that when she made her first visit to the cell block for a court date, “the marshals were surprised and laughed and shouted at my defendant: “Here comes your lady lawyer! ‘”

Judge Green served for more than a decade in the DC Superior Court, handling domestic disputes and criminal cases, as well as labyrinthine tax trials involving the DC government.

In 1979, the nomination of President Jimmy Carter led to her becoming only the third wife serve in the US District Court in Washington, where it ordered the DC Superior Court to stop excluding blind people from juries; ruled that the District had neglected to provide adequate health care to Latino inmates; and won over football fans by settling a union dispute that threatened to keep 26 Washington Redskins off the field for the end of the team’s 1993 season.

While maintaining a full caseload on the district court, Judge Green became the first woman appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where she ruled on secret intelligence requests and served for five years as presiding judge. He took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 1995.

James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the US District Court in Washington, described her as “a model judge in many ways,” adding that she was known “as much for her incisive decisions as for her modest demeanor and cozy in the bank”.

“As one of the first women appointed to our court, she was a mentor to many women attorneys and judges who followed her, some of whom she had hired as law clerks,” he said in a statement.

Just months after being appointed to the federal bench, Judge Green made national headlines during the Iran hostage crisis, during which she ordered special immigration checks to be carried out on more than 50,000 Iranians who were studying in the United States. He found that the students’ constitutional rights were being violated and subsequently faced death threats over his decision, which was overturned on appeal.

“Signifying a particular nationality because of a horrible activity in a faraway country was scary,” he said in a 2001 oral history interview for the D.C. Circuit Historical Society, comparing immigration controls to the detention of Japanese Americans.

Judge Green later sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission in its court battle against Stratton Oakmont, the predatory brokerage house that inspired Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street.” and blocked approval of a biological warfare laboratory the military planned to build. in Utah.

He also handed down what was widely described as the first ruling of its kind against a foreign country, declaring that the Chilean government could be sued in connection with the 1976 killing of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and a colleague, who were killed in 1976. a car bombing in Washington by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Judge Green awarded $4.9 million in damages to the families of the two victims.

After an Air Florida plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington shortly after takeoff in 1982, Judge Green was praised for his diligence and sensitivity in settling dozens of settlements on behalf of the survivors and the families of the 78 people who died.

“It saved everybody years of trial,” Donald W. Madole, a lawyer who represented many of the crash families, told The Washington Post in 1983. “I don’t know of any other plane crash case where it was resolved so quickly.”

Some of his most difficult legal work surrounded the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which became known as the “Bank of Offenders and Criminals” after prosecutors uncovered evidence of massive fraud and money laundering.

Judge Green approved a plea deal in 1992 in which the bank gave up $550 million in US assets, described at the time as the largest seizure in the country’s history. He later ordered $393 million of the bank’s assets to be handed over to a victims’ fund and presided over fraud cases involving bank executives such as Swaleh Naqvi, whom he sentenced to more than eight years in prison.

After nearly a decade working on BCCI cases, Justice Green largely distanced himself from the federal bench. He returned in 2004 for some of the most consequential cases of his career, playing what constitutional and human rights lawyer Jonathan Hafetz described as “a pivotal role” in the early legal battles surrounding the North’s military prison. American in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Opened in the months after 9/11, the prison grew to house hundreds of suspected terrorists who were detained as “unlawful enemy combatants” and denied basic legal rights and freedoms. After the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that prisoners could petition federal courts to challenge their detention, Judge Green was assigned to handle more than 60 legal claims by detainees.

It extended basic legal rights to prisoners, ruling in 2005 that the men had a constitutional right to due process.

“While this nation must take firm action under the leadership of the commander-in-chief to protect itself from enormous and unprecedented threats,” he wrote, “this need cannot deny the existence of the most basic fundamental rights to which the people of this country have fought and died for for over two hundred years.”

In her ruling, Judge Green also concluded that a new judicial process, established by the military to review the detainees’ detentions, was unconstitutional, with the detainees unable to determine the exact charges against them and the evidence cited. He also “questioned whether some of the information used against the detainees had been obtained through torture and was therefore unreliable, the first time that issue had been raised in a court opinion,” according to a New York Times report.

“This is a classic illustration of someone speaking truth to power,” military law specialist Eugene R. Fidell told The Post after Judge Green’s ruling. “It’s things like this that make the judiciary the crown jewel of our democracy.”

Some of the Guantánamo cases were handled by another federal judge, Richard J. Leon, who issued a decision more favorable to the George W. Bush administration, concluding that Guantánamo prisoners were not entitled to basic legal rights . The Supreme Court broadly sided with Judge Green, stating in 2008 that prisoners had the right to challenge their detention.

Legal issues continue for the 30 detainees who remain in prison.

“The lawyers who represented the detainees at Guantánamo had enormous respect for the care and diligence with which he approached these issues,” J. Wells Dixon, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said of Judge Green. Still, he added in a phone interview: “I don’t think she, or any of us, frankly, would have foreseen that those issues that she addressed so thoughtfully would remain unresolved almost two decades later. I don’t think anyone would have foreseen that “.

The youngest of two children, Ruth Joyce Martha Hens was born in New York City on November 13, 1928 and spent her early years in Pelham Manor, NY, where the family had a governess, butler and chauffeur.

His father, a psychiatrist of Polish origin who had grown up in Switzerland, had a thriving practice on Park Avenue in Manhattan. He also had a large stock portfolio, bought almost entirely on margin. Their possessions were liquidated during the Depression, prompting the family to move to a small apartment in the city before settling on the grounds of Spring Grove State Hospital in Catonsville, Maryland, where he get a job as a personal psychiatrist.

Encouraged by her parents to pursue a career in medicine, Judge Green enrolled at the University of Maryland at age 16. She was the only woman in her science classes of 300, where she found she had little interest in laboratory work with cats and inanimate objects. . What she wanted, she said, was to deal with people.

After receiving a degree in psychology in 1949, Judge Green enrolled in law school, beginning a chaotic two-year period in which she was briefly paralyzed from the waist down with polio; took two summer sessions in a row to run through his course requirements; and he took the bar exam early in the hope that he would have good professional news for his mother, who was dying of cancer.

She was admitted to the bar in 1951, one day before she formally graduated from law school. His mother died weeks later.

Judge Green became president of the DC Women’s Bar Association and developed a close friendship with June L. Green (no relation), who became the second woman appointed to the District Court of Washington. They shared a law firm before Judge Green left to start a law partnership with her husband, Samuel Green, a family law specialist whom she had once opposed in court.

They married in 1965 and he died of heart disease in 1983, aged 62.

In addition to her son James, survivors include two other children, Michael Green and Heather Cornett; a stepson, Phillip Green; and 13 grandchildren.

Judge Green said without her husband she would never have become a judge. After the birth of her first child in 1967, she decided to retire from the law to devote herself full-time to her family. She was at home that December, caring for her six-month-old son, when she got a call from a former colleague who now worked at the Department of Justice, asking if she might be interested in an opening on the General Sessions Court, a precursor to the DC Superior Court.

His answer was no.

She “quickly turned him down, expressed my joy at home life, my husband and our son, and the integrity of my life, but thanked him for thinking of me,” she recalled in the story oral “Then I called my husband and told him what had just happened.”

to his insistence, he called the official. The next day, she went to an interview and met with Warren Christopher, the assistant attorney general, who assuaged some of her concerns by talking about her law school classmate Shirley Hufstedler, who served as a judge in California and later became secretary of education. .

“She was married and had a child, and if she could do it, I could do it. Those literally were his words,” Judge Green recalled.

Even after Christopher said he would recommend her for the position, Judge Green never believed she would get the job. But three months later, with an appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmation by the Senate, he began his new career as a judge, in a borrowed robe, he said, because there hadn’t been time to make one. again .