A judge with a history of belittling women has been yanked from a sex discrimination case by an appellate panel that said he “suffocated” a female plaintiff’s access to fundamental fairness.
The case began going downhill when U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes quipped he would “get credit for closing two cases when I crush you.”
Finding he had prejudged and been “arbitrary and unreasonable,” the 5th U.S. Circuit ruled on Friday that Hughes should be removed from ruling on a psychology professor’s challenges against two universities and another judge must start from scratch. The cases have been re-assigned to Judge Andrew S. Hanen.
A trio of male judges from the conservative circuit ruled that Hughes lumped in the woman’s complaints about her employer with other unrelated cases, he repeatedly failed to give her chance to request documents through the discovery process and he did not allow the professor, Audrey K. Miller, to respond before dismissing her requests on the spot. The judge also made “off-key remarks” about how much Miller complained, and suggested the defense lawyers pursue a dismissal, they said.
Judges E. Grady Jolly, Leslie H. Southwick and Cory T. Wilson said in a opinion penned by Wilson that, “Although we are never quick to second-guess a district court’s management of discovery, we must do so here.”
“To put it simply,” they said. “the court’s discovery restrictions suffocated any chance for Miller fairly to present her claims.”
Miller should be entitled to “a full and fair opportunity to make her case in a fair and impartial forum,” the judges said, adding that, “Fundamental to the judiciary is the public’s confidence in the impartiality of our judges and the proceedings over which they preside.”
Hughes did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers on both sides did not respond to requests for comment.
Hughes, 79, a Houston native, has served since his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
He has drawn attention and criticism for his remarks and rulings. He issued a rare “order of ineptitude” to a terrorism prosecutor from Washington, D.C., who showed up to his courtroom in a track suit. In 2013, the circuit\criticized Hughes for dismissing comments allegedly made by a Fort Bend ISD official that if Barack Obama were to be elected president, the Statue of Liberty would have its torch replaced by a piece of fried chicken.
Lawyers responding to a 2019 Houston Bar Association poll found he needed the most improvement in being impartial, following the law, using lawyers’ time efficiently and being courteous to attorneys and witnesses.
The 5th Circuit admonished Hughes in 2018 after remarks to a female prosecutor about women that the court found “demeaning, inappropriate and beneath the dignity of a federal judge.”
The sanction in the criminal case came after Hughes said of a female prosecutor, “It was a lot simpler when you guys wore dark suits, white shirts and navy ties… We didn’t let girls do it in the old days.” Hughes previously explained to the Houston Chronicle he was speaking about an FBI agent and referring to the exclusion of women historically. He did not see his 2017 remarks as derogatory, he said.
The following year Hughes banished the female prosecutor in that case from his courtroom and told U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick, who stood up on her behalf, that he wouldn’t budge on the matter.
In the current civil matter before Hughes, Miller claimed Sam Houston State University and University of Houston-Downtown discriminated against her in job opportunities because she was a woman. The circuit found Hughes moved quickly through the court proceedings not giving Miller a chance to fully make her case. The court failed to give the Huntsville professor adequate opportunity to respond to his plans to dismiss her claims.
The judge then dismissed both cases “sua sponte,” without prompting by the parties.
Tom Berg, a criminal attorney who has appeared in Hughes’ courtroom many times, noted that while he wasn’t involved in the case, “A fair reading of Miller suggests that Judge Hughes stepped in it again, as the court cites a previous Hughes case critical of his penchant to be preemptive.”
Berg said that such rulings are rare and he suspects that the outcome of Miller’s case would have been the same if she’d been given the full range of rights. “Nonetheless, due process entitles a litigant a fair chance to present her case,” he said. “This is not about winning the cases but presenting them.
gabrielle.banks@chron.com
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