Saga of Tennessee Judge Fuels Legal Loophole Fight

The saga of Tennessee Judge David Lanier is almost too bad to be true.

The son of the county Democratic political boss, Lanier had a penchant both for accumulating power and for sexually assaulting women who came to his chambers. With his brother as county prosecutor, the judge apparently believed the law could not touch him.

He had not counted on the federal Ku Klux Klan Act, which was enacted 122 years ago to give federal officials authority to prosecute Southern sheriffs after the Civil War and has been widely used since then to prosecute local officials for all variety of misdeeds when local authorities would not do so.

A federal grand jury indicted Lanier on 11 counts involving sexual assaults, including two rapes. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Last January, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati threw out the case against him and ordered him freed. Why? Because, the court held, there is no “general constitutional right to be free of sexual assault” by public officials.

Now the case has advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court and the stakes are much greater than the fate of one judge. The law that enabled federal authorities, for example, to prosecute the two Los Angeles Police Department officers for violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, could lose some of its teeth.

Unless the appeals court opinion is reversed, those who are raped or sexually assaulted by police, prison guards or other local officials could be left with no legal protection.

Lanier, the son of the county Democratic political boss here, had served for 14 years as city mayor when he won election in 1982 as the county judge, a perch from which he decided everything from divorce and child custody disputes to workers’ compensation claims.

“This is a small county and he had power over people from cradle to grave,” said police inspector Joey McDowell.

Lanier also had a tendency, however, to assault women who came to his chambers. Since his brother, James O. Lanier, was elected county prosecutor in 1990, Judge Lanier apparently felt immune from prosecution even as stories about his predatory behavior multiplied.

Some of the stories involved court employees or young women who came for job interviews. One involved a woman with a custody case in Lanier’s court. Still others involved clerks for local lawyers whose duties required delivering papers to the courthouse.

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They testified that the tall, portly judge had pressed himself against them and grabbed their breasts or crotch. Several said that he had exposed himself under his black robe and demanded oral sex.

The worst incident involved Vivian Forsythe Archie, a young woman who had recently divorced and desperately needed a job if she was going to keep custody of her child. A high school friend of Lanier’s daughter, she went to see the judge about a job.

Near the end of the interview, Lanier grabbed her, tried to kiss her and pressed her into a chair. Then he forced her to to engage in an oral sex act.

The young woman, crying and frightened, fled from his chambers but told no one what had happened until interviewed by an FBI agent.

Taking the witness stand in his defense, the jowly judge with a graying pompadour explained that women found him attractive.

“I have never forced myself on any woman at any time,” he said. “I’m a hugging type person.”

Lanier was serving his 25-year prison term when, in a decision almost as shocking in its own way as Lanier’s conduct, the U.S. Court of Appeals threw out the entire case against him and ordered him freed.

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“The indictment in this case for a previously unknown, undeclared and undefined constitutional crime cannot be allowed to stand,” wrote Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of Nashville, a prominent Democrat appointed by President Carter. “We conclude that sexual assaults may not be prosecuted as violations of a constitutional . . . right to bodily integrity.”

This no doubt would come as a surprise to prison guards, schoolteachers, police officers and Border Patrol agents, all of whom have been charged over the past 20 years under federal law for sexual assaults involving persons in their custody.

Judges, however, are different, the Cincinnati-based appeals court said, because there was “no notice to the public” that the same rule applied to them. Lanier’s conviction had originally been affirmed by a three-judge panel of the court but it was reversed on a 9-6 vote by the full court.

The reversal drew several scorching dissents.

Calling the Lanier matter “one of the most deplorable cases to come before this court,” Judge Damon Keith of Detroit faulted his colleagues both for “a preposterous result” and for “the insensitive tone and lack of compassion permeating the majority opinion.”

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Merritt’s opinion, in an unusual departure, did not describe the facts of the case against Lanier. Indeed, during the oral argument in Cincinnati, several judges seemed to minimize the matter. One commented on women offering “sexual favors” to a public official, while another joked about whether the federal law would apply if a judge “beats the hell out of a . . . scalper for a ticket to the Reds game.”

“If he walks down to the stadium in his robe,” interjected Merritt to laughter in the court.

Crime author Darcy O’Brien was completing work on a book on the Lanier case entitled “Power to Hurt” when he attended the appeals court argument. He said that he was appalled by the tone of the questions.

“It was like a locker room atmosphere,” O’Brien said.

Vivian Archie was even more shocked when she heard of the ruling. “I thought it was pretty disgusting. They seemed to spend all their time trying to find a loophole to cover judicial misconduct,” she said.

Another of the dissenters, Judge Martha Craig Daughtery of Nashville, a recent appointee of President Clinton, tore into the notion that the federal criminal law could not apply to a state judge simply because the Supreme Court had not ruled in a specific case involving a sexual assault by a judge.

That is so, she wrote, only because the Supreme Court has yet to be faced with a case involving “a judge who so dishonored his profession or sunk to such levels of depravity as the defendant in this case.”

That void will soon be filled. On Jan. 7, the Supreme Court will hear the Justice Department’s appeal in the case (United States vs. Lanier, 95-1717). At stake is the reach of the 122-year old law that has allowed federal authorities to prosecute egregious crimes by local officials.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act to allow federal officials to intervene to protect newly freed slaves not only from lawless violence but also from abuse by Southern sheriffs.

The law declares in part that “whoever, under color of any law . . , willfully subjects any person in any state to the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured or protected by Constitution or laws of the United States” is guilty of a federal crime. This is now Section 242 of the U.S. Criminal Code.

The Justice Department says it brings about 30 cases a year under this section of the act.

The prosecution of two Los Angeles police officers in the King beating is one example. After Officers Stacey C. Koon and Laurence M. Powell were acquitted on state charges, they were charged and convicted under the federal law with violating King’s rights against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

In its brief to the high court in the Lanier case, the Justice Department noted that, since the 1700s, English and American law has considered the “right of personal security” to be fundamental. The 14th Amendment says that the government may not deprive persons of “liberty without due process of law” and many courts have said that an assault or rape perpetrated by a jailer or police officer violates the victim’s “right to bodily integrity.”

In Lanier’s case, it was crucial that federal authorities have the power to prosecute since it was clear that local officials, led by his brother, were not going to do so. “People were afraid of him,” said Sandy Sanders, one of Lanier’s victims. “Who was going to prosecute him? The D.A.?”

A juvenile court officer, Sanders testified that Lanier grabbed her breasts and buttocks in his chambers and then demoted her when she complained.

Patty Wallace, another court employee, said that Lanier had pawed her brazenly under a table during an open court hearing.

The two women estimated that at least 30 and possibly as many as 50 women had been grabbed or assaulted by Lanier during his years as a judge. Most were afraid to complain or waited too long to bring charges against him, they said.

“I can truthfully say [that] the government of the United States was the only protection these women had,” said Dyersburg Police Capt. Stan Cavness, who helped the FBI build its case against the judge. “The Laniers ran this town and everybody was afraid of crossing them.”

Much has changed, however. Prosecutor James O. Lanier died of cancer shortly before his brother was indicted on federal charges.

Since his conviction was overturned, Lanier, now 62, has been seen back in the town, located about 80 miles north of Memphis, but has kept a low profile. Last summer, he told one interviewer that he had “been vindicated totally” by the appeals court decision, although the ruling did not deal with the truthfulness of the charges against him.

In the Supreme Court, he will be represented by Nashville attorney Alfred H. Knight, who was appointed by Judge Merritt to represent Lanier after his previous attorney quit the case. In his brief, Knight argues that Lanier cannot be charged with acting “under color of law” because his sexual misconduct involved “purely personal acts.”

“These women were not in his custody so there was no violation of a governmental process,” Knight said.

Supporting the government, lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the California Women’s Law Center maintain that, unless the justices reverse the appeals court opinion, those who are raped or sexually assaulted by powerful local officials could be left with no legal protection.

“What’s shocking about this opinion is that they say beating up someone violates a constitutional right but raping someone doesn’t,” said Newport Beach, Calif., attorney Mary-Christine Sungaila, who filed the brief for the poverty law center.

Archie plans to attend the Supreme Court hearing but Wallace and Sanders said that they will stay home in Dyersburg. They have already been through too many court hearings in the Lanier case over the last five years, they said.

“It’s sad to say, but I don’t have much faith in the judicial system,” said Wallace, reflecting on the case last week. She paused and amended her thought. “But I do have confidence in the Supreme Court.”