Quick Facts
Biography
Emmet Gael Sullivan (born 1947) is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Howard University. He worked in private practice for more than a decade at Houston & Gardner, becoming a name partner in 1980. He was appointed to the bench of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals as an Associate Judge in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush and to the federal bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton.
Education and career
Sullivan was born in Washington, D.C. in 1947 and attended local schools. He graduated from McKinley Technology High School in 1964. In 1968, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Howard University, a historically black college, and in 1971 a Juris Doctor from the Howard University School of Law.
Upon graduation from law school, Sullivan received a Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship; he was assigned to the Neighborhood Legal Services Program in Washington, D.C., where he worked for one year. The following year, he served as a law clerk to Superior Court Judge James A. Washington Jr., a former professor and Acting Dean of Howard University School of Law.
In 1973, Sullivan joined the law firm of Houston & Gardner, co-founded by Charles Hamilton Houston, who had developed Howard University Law School as its dean, and led litigation for the NAACP to overturn racially restrictive laws. Sullivan became a partner and was actively engaged in the general practice of law with that firm.
In August 1980, his partner, William C. Gardner, was appointed as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Sullivan was a name partner in the successor firm of Houston, Sullivan & Gardner. He also taught as an adjunct professor at the Howard University School of Law and has served as a member of the visiting faculty at Harvard Law School's Trial Advocacy Workshop.
Sullivan was appointed by President Reagan to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia on October 3, 1984. On November 25, 1991, Sullivan was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve as an Associate Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Federal judicial service
Sullivan was nominated by President Bill Clinton on March 22, 1994, to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia vacated by Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on June 15, 1994, and received his commission on June 16, 1994.
Notable cases
Sullivan presided over a number of habeas corpus petitions in the early 21st century submitted on behalf of men detained by the United States military at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as part of President George W. Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks of terrorism.
Sullivan presided over the 2008 trial of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, who was convicted of seven felony ethics violations in October. During the trial, the judge refused requests by the defense for a mistrial to be declared, after information was revealed that the prosecution had withheld exculpatory Brady material. Eight days after the guilty verdict, Stevens narrowly lost his reelection bid. As more evidence of prosecutorial misconduct became known in early 2009, Judge Sullivan held four prosecutors in civil contempt of court. On April 1, 2009, following a Justice Department probe that found additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, the Department of Justice recommended that Stevens' conviction be dismissed. On April 7, 2009, Sullivan set aside the conviction and appointed a lawyer to investigate the prosecution team for criminal contempt. Subsequently, one of the four prosecutors held in contempt committed suicide.Ultimately, Sullivan dismissed the civil contempt charges, and no additional charges were brought against the prosecutors.
In 2014, Sullivan was presiding over a case, Judicial Watch v. IRS, related to an ongoing investigation into the 2013 IRS controversy. There was an attempt to determine where the deleted emails of former IRS employee Lois Lerner had gone, what damage to her computer hard drive occurred, and what steps the IRS had taken to recover the information contained in the emails and on the hard drive.
In 2015 Sullivan presided over a FOIA lawsuit involving the matter of Hillary Clinton's private email use while Secretary of State.
In the case of United States of America v. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser to Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras as shown in the indictment released on December 1, 2017. On December 7, 2017, Contreras recused himself from the sentencing hearings to take place in the Flynn case. The case was randomly reassigned to Sullivan.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a woman and her child fled domestic abuse in El Salvador to seek asylum in the U.S. However the mother was removed from her detention facility and likely put on a plane on August 9, 2018, despite Justice Department promises that she and others would not be deported before the judge could rule on their cases. Sullivan demanded, "Turn that plane around." He threatened to hold those responsible for the removal in contempt of court, starting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, if the situation was not rectified. A Department of Homeland Security official stated, "We are complying with the court's requests...the plaintiffs will not disembark and will be promptly returned to the United States." An ACLU suit challenged a recent decision by Sessions to make it nearly impossible for victims of domestic violence and gangs to qualify for asylum in the U.S. The lawsuit claims the woman and her young daughter came to the U.S. from El Salvador after twenty years of spousal abuse and her receiving death threats from a violent gang."