January ended with a notable week for federal courts because of the voices of its judges.
Judges in Minnesota and Texas spoke with clarity in these troubled times. In between them, a longtime Iowa federal judge’s voice fell silent after a quarter century of delivering justice, along with lessons in compassion, fairness and our shared history.
Robert W. Pratt was 78 when he died last week. The Emmetsburg native was a U.S. district judge in the southern half of Iowa from 1997 to 2023.
Pratt began his legal career working for Iowa Legal Aid, a nonprofit law firm that champions society’s underdogs and gives a voice to those who rarely are heard in our society.
As a judge, Pratt was at the center of a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court case, Gall vs. United States, that recognized federal judges deserve a louder voice when issuing sentences in criminal cases.
Before the Gall precedent, federal sentencing guidelines severely constrained judges in the name of exacting uniform penalties nationwide. For Brian Gall, who was accused of drug law violations, that would have meant three years in federal prison.
But Judge Pratt, after hearing the facts of Gall’s brief involvement in a drug conspiracy, his actions to turn his life around and stay out of legal trouble for years after, opted for probation not prison.
The U.S. Justice Department objected because the sentence did not conform to the federal guidelines. But the Supreme Court sided with Pratt by making clear that sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory. The justices said when trial judges offer reasonable explanations for their decisions, appeals courts should not second-guess them just because they might have imposed a different sentence.
The Supreme Court’s ruling underscored that trial judges do more than rubber stamp government policies or political agendas. Instead, as constitutionally independent arbiters, judges can exercise their discretion as to whether, when and how to act.
That brings us to two judges whose decision-making was on public display in cases growing from the controversial actions in Minneapolis by demonstrators and federal immigration agents. The judges’ orders sharply rebuked federal officials.
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of Texas ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release Minneapolis asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his 5-year-old son Liam from a Texas detention center. A photo of Liam in his blue floppy-eared winter hat quickly became a symbol of the government’s crackdown on immigrants.
