The nomination of Wilma Lewis for a federal judgeship is giving one Republican senator a chance to revisit Lewis' tenure as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Lewis has been nominated for U.S. District Court in the Virgin Islands, where she began her legal career. But from 1998 to 2001, she was the top prosecutor in Washington, a job that involves overseeing highly publicized criminal cases while surviving political infighting.
Some of the flashpoints of her tenure came up recently in written questions sent to her by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley is not opposing Lewis’ nomination, but he did find plenty to ask about.
Grassley brought up the case of Carl Cooper, who was charged in the killing of three Starbucks employees in Georgetown in 1997. Lewis opposed seeking the death penalty against Cooper, and Grassley asked her if she, as a judge, would be able to apply the federal death penalty in appropriate cases.
In response, Lewis wrote that she would. She added that, contrary to Grassley’s recounting of the case, she did not base her opposition to the death penalty on either race (Cooper was black, while two victims were white) or on the anti-death-penalty views of D.C. residents. “I do not believe, nor have I ever believed, that the defendant’s race should be a factor in deciding whether or not to impose the death penalty in a death-eligible first degree murder case,” she wrote.
In another question, Grassley asked whether some of the handgun prosecutions brought during Lewis’ tenure would be constitutional today, given recent Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment. Lewis wrote that she couldn’t answer without a careful analysis, but that she would follow Supreme Court precedent if confirmed.
And in a third question, the senator brought up a public spat between Lewis and Louis Freeh, then the director of the FBI. Lewis disagreed with a decision to transfer out of her office a case regarding the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudia Arabia. As recounted by Grassley, she publicly characterized Freeh's initiative to transfer the case as “ill-conceived and ill-considered.”
Lewis responded that she spoke out at the time to defend the integrity and reputation of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which she said had been wrongly accused of handling the case poorly.
“Nonetheless,” she wrote to Grassley, “if I were faced with the same situation today — with ten years of additional seasoning — I would resort to my characteristically less public and more measured demeanor, an appropriate temperament that, if confirmed, I would bring to the federal bench.”
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed Lewis’ nomination without a recorded vote. A final confirmation vote in the Senate has not been scheduled.
Click here (PDF) for the full back and forth between Grassley and Lewis.
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