|
| November 23, 2009 |
By: Alyson M. Palmer |
|
udge Charles R. Wilson has played a key role in some of the highest-profile cases heard by the 11TH U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in recent memory.
Wilson sat on the three-judge panel that signed off on the federal government's decision to send young Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba to be with his father. And he was the dissenting judge on the panel that heard the Terri Schiavo case, insisting in vain that the federal courts should hold further proceedings before allowing Schiavo to die.
More recently, Wilson, 55, was an important voice in rare full-court arguments—albeit in cases that are unlikely to get that sort of media attention—having authored the panel opinion in an interesting hostile work environment case and a dissent from the panel ruling on a sex offender registry question.
Still, in relenting to a request for an interview, Wilson insists that an article about him will be boring. As is typical among federal judges, he is firm on one point—he is not going to talk about the court's cases.
“He's not very exciting,” says former 11TH Circuit Judge Joseph W. Hatchett, for whom Wilson clerked, then went on to replace on the bench. “I don't think he goes out of the way to draw attention to himself.” Wilson never did, Hatchett says.
“He's very, very smart, of course,” Hatchett adds. “But he doesn't flaunt it. He just does it very quietly.”
Quiet though it may have been, Wilson's rise to a spot on the 11TH Circuit at the young age of 44 a decade ago is impressive. He calls it a “pretty neat” feat that someone who had a hard time finding a job out of law school would land a spot on one of the most prestigious courts in the land.
Wilson says he tells his law clerks that it's difficult to plan your career 10 years out or more. He tells them to be prepared to seize the opportunities when they present themselves by establishing their reputations in the bar and the community.
“That's pretty much my story,” says Wilson. “I've always been prepared for the opportunity when it became available, and I didn't plan anything.”
'Judge like a champion'
Born in Pensacola, Fla., in 1954, Wilson is a fourth-generation Floridian on both sides of his family, which he points out is somewhat unusual. He's also a second-generation lawyer, having followed in the footsteps of his father, Charles F. Wilson.
Wilson recalls that when his father started practicing law in Pensacola in 1953, he was the only African-American lawyer in the panhandle. It was the year before Wilson was born, and the year before the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483. Wilson's father worked throughout the 1950s and '60s to desegregate the public institutions of the Florida panhandle, says the judge.
Wilson was just a little boy when his father was working on desegregation cases, and the younger Wilson moved to Tampa with his mother after his parents divorced when he was 7. “I was too small to understand,” he says. Yet Wilson remembers: “There were incidents back then, and of course, he would tell us stories.” There were times when his father would have to walk through a wall of protesters, and one time someone shot through the window of the family home in Pensacola.
Still, the soft-spoken judge downplays the tension. “Pensacola wasn't really as bad as a lot of other places around the South,” he says. “They were able to work out a lot of the desegregation cases.”
Despite his Florida roots, Wilson decided to head to the Midwest for college. “As soon as I got out of the car,” Wilson recalls of his trip to visit the University of Notre Dame, “that was it.” He would go on to get his law degree from Notre Dame as well, becoming, in the parlance of the school's alumni, a “Double Domer.”
Those who know Wilson say Notre Dame sports rate high on his list of outside interests, even using the word “fanatical” to describe his level of devotion. He has posted in his work room a gift from law clerks—a sign that says “Judge Like a Champion Today,” a twist on the “Play Like a Champion Today” sign that Notre Dame football players smack before heading out to the field for a game. When he became an 11TH Circuit judge, colleagues he was leaving behind gave him a judge's robe lined inside with school symbols.
Yet back home in Florida after law school, says Wilson, he applied to several local law firms but didn't get those jobs. “I didn't even get hired by the U.S. attorney's office,” he recalls, noting that was his real aim. He will say that maybe his race was a factor in his difficulties getting a job, but he sounds disinclined to make much of that.
Following a brief stint with the county attorney's office in Tampa and his clerkship with Hatchett, Wilson hung out his own shingle. He says he took a lot of court-appointed criminal defense work, as well as employment discrimination, bankruptcy, family, probate and Social Security disability matters. “I was looking for whatever paid the rent at the time,” he recalls.
He says he didn't have aims to be a judge, even after he clerked for Hatchett. And he says he didn't have any high-profile cases as a lawyer. But he was elected president of the Young Lawyer's Section of the county bar association. And he was in court a lot, including the courtroom of the then-chief judge of the 13th Judicial Circuit, a state trial court in Tampa, Guy W. Spicola. The chief judge suggested he apply for an opening on the state court bench, says Wilson.
“I guess he saw my involvement in the bar and the community,” says Wilson. “And I practiced in his courtroom pretty extensively.”
Then-Gov. Bob Graham appointed him to serve out the departing judge's term, and Wilson didn't face opposition when he had to face voters. After five years on the state court bench, the federal district court judges selected him to fill a federal magistrate judge vacancy.
Wilson had been a federal magistrate judge for five years when an interesting opportunity presented itself. By this time, Wilson was interested in being a federal district court judge, but his bids for a couple of vacancies on the district court had been unsuccessful. Then, in 1994, the U.S. attorney in Tampa, Larry H. Colleton, was asked to resign. Colleton had been caught on camera grabbing a television reporter by the neck, and there were morale and other problems in the office, Wilson explains with some hesitancy, saying he doesn't want to demonize his predecessor. He calls Colleton a great guy who was perhaps too young and unready for the job. Wilson recalls that it was a big deal in the local African-American community to have Colleton in the post, as he was one of the few black U.S. attorneys in the country at the time.
“I think it was very important for the black community to find an African-American to replace Larry Colleton as the U.S. attorney,” says Wilson. He says he wasn't terribly interested in the job and didn't apply for it. “I was recruited for it,” he says.
The decision to tap Wilson was handled by Graham, who was by then a U.S. senator, and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who had an unusually high level of involvement in the selection process, says Wilson. “The next thing I know I was United States attorney,” says Wilson.
The 11TH Circuit judge admits he had an ulterior motive: He was still hoping for a job as a district court judge. “I felt like if I did a pretty good job, then I'd have a shot at the district court,” says Wilson.
He could hardly coast through his job as a prosecutor. The Middle District of Florida housed one of the biggest U.S. attorney's offices in the country. Wilson says the community was fast-growing. Press accounts at the time described him as a low-key U.S. attorney, saying he was credited with bringing stability to the office.
Wilson began setting his sights higher. When Hatchett announced that he was retiring, Wilson expressed an interest in the 11TH Circuit job. President Bill Clinton nominated him for the post. Despite a backlog of nominees at the time, Wilson was confirmed by the Senate in about two months. He credits his bipartisan support from Graham and the state's Republican senator at the time, Connie Mack, for his good fortune.
Neither shy nor dominant
Wilson, now the only black judge on the 11TH Circuit, set up his chambers in the federal courthouse in Tampa. But one of Wilson's former law clerks, Atlanta lawyer Leland H. “Lee” Kynes, says Wilson, in keeping with his low-profile personality, doesn't even have his name on the courthouse's marquee. “That's a district courthouse,” explains Wilson, “and I consider myself a guest.”
On the bench at oral argument, he's not shy, but doesn't tend to dominate every argument, either. It depends on the case, says Kynes, now an associate with the Atlanta office of Holland & Knight. “There might be some cases where he wouldn't ask a single question,” says Kynes, “but then there are other cases where he's really active.” Some 11TH Circuit judges ask questions because they like the sound of their own voices, says Kynes. “He's not one of those judges.”
“For me, it's more like a conversation with the lawyers,” Wilson explains. He says he finds oral argument helpful, and lawyers should come prepared to answer questions, not make a closing argument.
Lawyers who evaluated Wilson in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary describe his written opinions as succinct. They don't have the rhetorical flourishes of those written by his colleague Judge Edward E. Carnes, for example. Even in his opinion in the Schiavo case, in which he wrote that he strongly dissented, Wilson limited his references to the emotional nature of the case, saying simply, “I am aware of no injury more irreparable than death.”
Lawyers observing Wilson also have found him difficult to pin down on any ideological spectrum. Some lawyers quoted in the almanac that reviews judges called him one of the most liberal on the circuit, while others said he leaned slightly toward the government. Generally, they call him fair and even-handed.
“I don't think you can peg him as someone with a particular judicial philosophy,” says Kynes, saying that's in contrast to Carnes and two other colleagues, Judges Rosemary Barkett and William H. Pryor Jr.
“I just call them as I see them,” says Wilson, “and I try to decide each case on its merits without regard to ideology.”
Outside the court, Wilson has a few major professional obligations. He's a member of the American Bar Association's body that serves as the accrediting agency for the nation's law schools. And he also sits on the committee of the federal Judicial Conference that answers questions about, and occasionally revisits, the ethics rules that govern federal judges.
In his personal time, Wilson keeps tabs on his two daughters; one is in college, and the other is in law school. Wilson is a regular runner, logging 20 miles some weeks. His wife Belinda, who works for Regents Bank, runs as well.
Wilson runs a 15K that's part of a Tampa festival each February, and Kynes says the judge takes pride in his excellent track record against clerks who have challenged him in the race. (Wilson says only about four clerks have beaten him—and “not until a couple of years ago.”)
Asked what he's treasured most about his time on the court, Wilson mentions his relationship with his law clerks. “You develop real close bonds with them,” Wilson says.
Kynes describes Wilson as a great boss. “He's a pretty easy-going guy,” says Kynes. “There's not a whole lot of drama. He treats his clerks with a lot of respect and gives them a lot of responsibility. He's the sort of person who commands respect without saying anything.”
Stephen M. Barbas, a lawyer in Tampa whose friendship with Wilson goes back to their days at Jesuit High School there, says Wilson is “from the old school.” He recalls that when Barbas' brother-in-law was in the hospital, Wilson visited him, even though the two weren't close. “That's just the way he is,” says Barbas.
Barbas notes that the motto of their high school alma mater, which he describes as a very tight-knit boys' school, is “A man for others.”
“That's Chuck Wilson,” says Barbas. “He's a man for others.”
Alyson M. Palmer reports for the Daily Report, an affiliate of the Daily Business Review.
Charles R. Wilson photo by Zachary D. Porter
|
Search the archive for more stories.
|
