By Steven Long

There are times when the judiciary, even the federal one, makes a boneheaded move that is breathtaking in its arrogance and asinine in its stupidity. Such has been the case in recent months regarding the possible removal of U.S. District Judge Samuel B. Kent of Galveston.

I have known and liked the judge for more than 25 years. In fact, for a time when I ran an alternative paper in the island city the judge’s late wife, Mary Ann, wrote some articles for us.

Sam was an occasional visitor to “The Judge’s Table” at the island city’s late lamented Ship Ahoy Cafeteria, a steam table restaurant where the blue plate specials rivaled home cooking in just about in any farmhouse in the Lone Star State. I salivate to this day just thinking about the black-eyed peas.

I’m sad to say that just about all of the regulars at the table are gone now, their lofty opinions and conversations wafted one by one to a banquet with the biggest raconteur of them all. I and a couple of other laymen were the only non-lawyers who were accepted to sit with the lawyers and judges. For the five years I was a daily visitor at the table, I learned more about law and life than I ever could have in a journalism class or a newspaper office. I learned a little about highly placed sources as well.

Among my regular luncheon companions were four state judges and the island’s lone federal judge, the late and revered Judge Hugh Gibson. All became trusted personal friends, not that it would have helped me if I ever wound up on the inside of the bar of justice. As one of the regulars, the recently passed Judge Don B. Morgan once told me, “Friendship is one thing, but business is business.”

Kent was an infrequent visitor to the table, but he came with a degree of regularity. At the time he was practicing admiralty law – no surprise in a seaport town. He had the reputation of being an intellectual whiz kid, yet a down to earth hail fellow well met. He was also a Republican, a rare species in a wildly Democratic place like Galveston where card carrying members of the GOP were largely found in an obscure corner of the local country club playing a weary game of gin while discussing debentures. If I were forced to pick the last person in the world who would be appointed to the federal bench to follow Hugh Gibson’s retirement it would have been Sam Kent.

Yet the Bush (41) appointed Kent to the bench. From what I heard, Sam was a great judge. Moreover, he made some astonishingly progressive rulings for a Republican appointee. He was cut much more from the fine legalistic cloth of a David Souter and less from the stiff unyielding canvass or a Samuel Alito.

And his writing from the bench was sometimes extraordinary. Occasionally, it was even funny. He once suggested in an order of transfer that for a district judge to have jurisdiction over a foreign nation’s issues it would be proper if a restaurant serving that nation’s cuisine be located in the court’s jurisdiction. He denied the motion to move the case to seafood loving Galveston.

I only saw Kent preside once, and then just briefly during a return trip to Galveston when I covered a hearing for my book, Out of Control. He was impressive; a big man now in the black robes of justice. The former admiralty lawyer was downright imposing. Even more telling was the incredible intellect he demonstrated in a series of rulings and orders issued in staccato succession over a period of just a couple of minutes. There was assertiveness that I never saw demonstrated during countless lunches with him in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Ship Ahoy. There Kent usually sat quietly and spoke seldom.

After assuming the bench we seldom ever spoke to each other. I was now in Houston, while he remained in Galveston. From time to time I would make a rare journalistic call to Kent for reasons long forgotten. He was always warm and accommodating, never aloof, as so many judges become after they undergo the metamorphosis from being workaday lawyers to supreme federal beings. We had never been close like I was with many of the lawyers and judges at the old luncheon table. In fact, we barely knew each other. Yet those days at the Ship Ahoy counted for something. Every time I heard something he had done on the news, heard of another in a string of wise rulings, or heard of a funny opinion, I would get the warm fuzzies that my old acquaintance was acquitting himself well on the bench.

Others didn’t.

As a matter of fact, Sam Kent was roundly hated among some lawyers who came before him - and rightfully so. You see, the judge had a sharp tongue – and his favorite word to use to describe motions that didn’t measure up to his exacting standards of syntax was “asinine.” In fact one lawyer is alleged to have done a computer search of the judge’s rulings and learned he had used the word asinine 13 times in the 11 years between his appointment to the bench in 1990 and 2001. A further search by the same attorney for the word in judicial rulings and opinions found it had only been used by federal judges in their writings 16 times since 1944.

Kent’s Wikipedia biographical blurb (undoubtedly written by an enemy) cites another ruling in which the judge described a motion in his written opinion as “patently, insipid, ludicrous and unequivocally without any merit whatsoever,” going on to write that the “obnoxiously ancient, boilerplate, inane Motion is emphatically DENIED” (Kent’s caps). He then disqualified the lawyer who penned what Kent termed “asinine tripe” from representing his client in the case.

In short, Sam Kent had angered some of the lawyers who came his bench. Some began to call him a judicial bully behind his back.

Others probably cheered the hulking judge because he suffered neither fools nor writers of gratuitous writs lightly.

Rumors spread in the legal community as well about allegations of a change in the judge’s demeanor when he was drinking.


“He just became a different person,” a longtime Galveston journalist told me.

Yet the grumblings bubbled below the surface not blowing at hurricane force until a different sort of allegation emerged.


In May, Kent’s case manager, Cathy McBroom alleged in a complaint that two months before, the judge called her to his office and then pulled up her shirt and bra. She said he then put his mouth to her breast and proceeded to push her head toward his crotch.

Other court employees began to quietly speak of sexual harassment as well.

By August, the judge was told to go home and await the outcome of a ruling by his judicial superiors, all the while collecting his $165,000 annual federal salary.

Chief Judge Hayden Head of the Southern District of Texas ordered Kent not to hear cases between Sept. 1, 2007 and Jan. 1, 2008.

Inevitably, the fact that Kent had been removed from the bench temporarily had leaked to the press. The press also learned that 85 of his cases had been re-assigned to other jurisdictions, and his repeated appointment of a close friend was now under scrutiny.

The courts had protected one of their own, and failed to tell the public the nature of the allegations against Sam Kent. The federal court system was engaged in a de facto cover-up of the investigation and potential disciplinary measures against Judge Sam Kent. Equally bad, Kent’s defense against the allegations was heard only by his fellow judges. The public was shut out of the information loop. Were it not for the press, the matter would undoubtedly have been swept under the carpet.

It was reported in the online version of the respected Texas Lawyer that the Judicial Council of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had acted swiftly. In late September the paper reported they had issued an order saying only that a complaint of sexual harassment toward an employee of the federal judicial system had been received. The order it issued said “The council concluded the proceedings ‘because appropriate remedial action ad been and will be taken, including but not limited to the Judge’s four-month leave of absence from the bench, reallocation of the Galveston/Houston docket and other measures.”

Court observers and the public were left scratching their heads and wondering what had really happened to prompt Kent’s removal from his court.

It didn’t take long for details to leak.

McBroom’s lawyer, famed Houston criminal defense attorney Rusty Harden was talking, telling the press that the judge’s actions had gone far beyond being just employer/employee sexual harassment, as the Fifth Circuit had announced. Harden, claimed that Kent had committed a felony.

As details of McBroom’s allegations emerged cries for Kent’s scalp quickly increased in volume and seriousness.

Federal judges are appointed for life, and the only way they can be removed is by impeachment by Congress.

The Fifth Circuit could have made such a recommendation. Instead, the appellate court did neither and continued to protect the reputation of one of their own. By not releasing details of its findings the court served neither the rights of the accuser, nor of the accused.

What little that had leaked in the press prompted National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy to say the Fifth Circuit’s actions were “woefully inadequate.” The group has asked for an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.

Thus far nothing has happened in the House, nor is anything likely to happen in the near future. Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Michigan, and his ranking Republican counterpart Rep. Lamar Smith issued a statement punting the investigative ball, at least for the time being.

“The recently publicized charges against United States District Judge Samuel Kent are shocking and cause grave concern to all of us…While the alleged conduct is disgraceful; it is, nonetheless, the practice of the House Committee on the Judiciary to defer formal action until intermediate remedies have been pursued.”

Meanwhile, McBroom had been transferred to the Federal Courthouse on Rusk Street. in Houston. In late October Kent’s superiors transferred him from his Galveston jurisdiction 50 miles away to the same courthouse in downtown Houston. McBroom and the judge will likely see each other in the Houston courthouse, perhaps on a daily basis.

His cases are now divided among the Houston federal courts. And come January, Kent will become a active judge again.

Even after all the leaks and news stories, the courts have yet to release details of their investigations to the public. Nobody knows for sure if Sam Kent really did lift the woman’s top and kiss her breasts. Nobody knows for sure if he did attempt to move her face to his crotch. And nobody knows what he has had to say to his fellow judges about all the allegations against him.

In the words of Judge Sam Kent, that is asinine.