Thelton Henderson, the federal judge who has presided over two long-running civil rights cases focused on conditions in California prisons and the conduct of the Oakland Police Department, will step down from the bench later this year.
Reuters reported Monday that Henderson will retire in August after serving for more than 35 years with the U.S. District Court for Northern California. From the Reuters piece:
In an interview, the 83-year-old Henderson said he does not have the stamina to do the job as well as he previously had. He declined to discuss what effect his decision might have on specific cases.
Henderson said he has mixed feelings about leaving now that Donald Trump is to become president of the United States, and several civil rights issues remain unsettled.
“These are the kind of battles I like, if I had the energy,” Henderson told Reuters. “But I don’t.”
Henderson told The Recorder, San Francisco’s daily legal affairs journal, that he was “starting to feel the grind.”
“I probably will serve the court best if I don’t play a season too long like Kobe Bryant just did,” Henderson said, referring to the recently retired Los Angeles Lakers star.
Henderson has been at the center of the high-profile prison and Oakland police cases for more than a decade.
The Oakland case grew out of the Riders civil rights case, in which the Police Department was accused of systematic violation of suspects’ civil rights. Henderson oversees a settlement negotiated in 2003 under which the city agreed to wholesale reforms involving training, oversight, ending biased policing and standards of officer conduct. The department has been close to full compliance, but suffered a setback last year when questions arose about its handling of a sexual exploitation case involving several Oakland officers and the teenage daughter of a police dispatcher.
The prison case Henderson has overseen as part of a three-judge federal panel arose from lawsuits alleging that the abysmal level of physical and mental health care in California’s correctional system — and extreme overcrowding throughout its institutions — violated inmate civil rights and the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The state has lost repeated challenges to Henderson’s orders to reduce prison overcrowding and undertake sweeping improvement in inmate health care.
Jim Chanin, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiated the Oakland Police Department settlement, told the East Bay Times he will miss having Henderson supervise the case:
“I think he’s been enormously helpful to the reform effort. I will miss him,” Chanin said. “However, it’s a well-deserved retirement.”
Henderson agreed OPD was close to achieving the reforms: “I was saying before the sex scandal broke out we could all see the light at the end of the tunnel. And then the wheels fell off.”
His replacement on the case has not yet been named.
“We have a wonderful court and a bunch of really bright young judges. One of them will get this case and I will talk to them … I have no doubt whoever gets this case is going to do exactly what I’ve been doing on this case,” he said. “Not that much will change.
Henderson leaves the bench after a journey that saw him come to UC Berkeley from Los Angeles to play football as an undergraduate, attend Boalt Hall law school, and go on to a career as a civil rights lawyer, U.S. Justice Department attorney and judge.
Here’s one snippet from The Recorder piece:
Henderson became the first African-American lawyer to work for the U.S. Department of Justice on voting rights cases in the South. But he was forced to resign from his post after he loaned his car to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and drew criticism that the government was improperly taking sides.
After time in private practice back in the Bay Area and at the Legal Aid Society in East Palo Alto, Henderson took a position with Stanford University in 1968 working to recruit minority students to the law school, which had only one black graduate at the time.
Stanford Professor Emeritus Barbara Babcock said that Henderson was the right person for the job because “he really knew what it took to be one of very few minority people in a privileged white atmosphere and he knew who could do it.”
… Henderson, who worked at Stanford for eight years before returning to private practice, said that lessons he learned there affected his approach on the bench.
“I learned the importance of institutionalizing” change, Henderson said. … The goal is not just to make temporary changes, but make changes that are going to last long after I’m gone.’