Ex-Judge Fleeing Sex Charges Caught

The fugitive Tennessee judge who fled rather than return to prison for having sexually assaulted five women was captured Monday in Mexico and taken to San Diego.

David W. Lanier, a former state judge, will be held at the Metropolitan Correction Center in San Diego while he awaits transfer to a federal prison.

U.S. marshals who had been searching for Lanier across the nation were uncertain where he had fled. They did know that earlier this year he had rented an apartment in the Mission Bay area of San Diego under the alias of Aubrey Lane Thompson.

Mexican police apprehended him Monday when he visited the post office in Ensenada. He was turned over to U.S. authorities at the border.

By one account from federal officials, Lanier was seen at a topless nightclub in Ensenada over the weekend, but that could not be confirmed.

The capture of Lanier, 63, appears to cap a bizarre case that had outraged women’s rights activists.

A powerful judge in the small west Tennessee town of Dyersburg, Lanier was accused of making sexual advances to at least a dozen women in his chambers. On two occasions, he raped women who came to ask for jobs, authorities said.

But his brother was the county prosecutor and most observers believed that that was the main reason Lanier escaped state criminal charges.

In 1992, federal prosecutors charged him with sex crimes in Memphis and won a conviction on five counts. Lanier received a 25-year prison term. But the U.S. appeals court in Cincinnati reversed his conviction and ordered him freed on the theory that a sexual assault is not covered by federal law.

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling. But by August, when the appeals court finally ordered Lanier to return to prison, he had fled.

On Saturday, Lanier was featured on the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” but that publicity did not lead to his capture, marshals said. Instead, they said, they learned that a Chicago company had received a request for fake identification cards from an “Aubrey Thompson” living in Ensenada. “We had known the alias he was using and that led us to him,” said Deputy U.S. Atty. Tommy Thompson of Memphis.

Crime author Darcy O’Brien, whose book “Power to Hurt” chronicled the Lanier case, said the tale of corruption and seediness came to an appropriate end.

“As I understand it, he was seen in a topless bar in Ensenada on Saturday night. And from everything I know about, it fits,” O’Brien said.