Henry Harold Kennedy Jr. (born February 22, 1948) is an inactive Senior United States district judge of the

United States District Court for the District of Columbia The United States District Court for the District of Columbia (in case citations, D.D.C.) is a federal district court in the District of Columbia. It also occasionally handles (jointly with the United States District Court for the District of ...

Education and career

Born in

Columbia Columbia may refer to: * Columbia (personification), the historical female national personification of the United States, and a poetic name for America Places North America Natural features * Columbia Plateau, a geologic and geographic region in ...

South Carolina )''Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no) , anthem = " Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind" , Former = Province of South Carolina , seat = Columbia , LargestCity = Charleston , LargestMetro = ...

, Kennedy graduated with an A.B. from the

Princeton School of Public and International Affairs The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) is a professional public policy school at Princeton University. The school provides an array of comprehensive course ...

(then the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) in 1970 after completing a senior thesis titled "Black Politics in

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

, 1888-1900." He later received a J.D. from

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

in 1973. Following graduation, he worked for the

law firm A law firm is a business entity formed by one or more lawyers to engage in the practice of law. The primary service rendered by a law firm is to advise clients (individuals or corporations) about their legal rights and responsibilities, and to r ...

of Reavis, Pogue, Neal and Rose in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Subsequent to this he was an

Assistant United States Attorney An assistant United States attorney (AUSA) is an official career civil service position in the U.S. Department of Justice composed of lawyers working under the U.S. Attorney of each U.S. federal judicial district. They represent the federal gove ...

for the District of Columbia between 1973 and 1976. He served as a United States Magistrate of the

between 1976 and 1979. He was appointed Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in December 1979 where he served until he was appointed as a federal judge in September 1997.

Federal judicial service

On May 15, 1997, Kennedy was nominated by

President Clinton William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again ...

to a seat on the

vacated by

Joyce Hens Green Joyce Hens Green (born November 13, 1928) is a Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Green was nominated by President Jimmy Carter on March 6, 1979, to a seat vacated by Howard F. C ...

. Kennedy was confirmed by the

United States Senate The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and pow ...

on September 4, 1997, and received his commission on September 18, 1997. He took

senior status Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for United States federal judges. To qualify, a judge in the Federal judiciary of the United States, federal court system must be at least 65 years old, and the sum of the judge's age and years of servi ...

on November 18, 2011 due to a certified disability and is currently in inactive senior status.

Personal life

He is married to Altomease Rucker Kennedy, a lawyer who is a partner with the firm of Sanford Heisler Sharp, where she specializes in False Claims Act litigation. She is the author of a novel, Friends and Lovers in Black and White. They have two daughters, Morgan and Alexandra, both of whom are graduates of Princeton University. Kennedy's brother, Randall Kennedy, is a professor at Harvard Law School. His sister, Angela Kennedy Acree, is a lawyer with the District of Columbia Public Defender Service.

Notable cases

*In November 2007, Kennedy ordered the Bush White House to preserve its emails. *On January 9, 2008, Kennedy rejected a request from terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay seeking a court hearing into the destruction of interrogation tapes by the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

in 2005. *On August 16, 2010, Kennedy ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainee

Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif (1981 – September 8, 2012), also known as Allal Ab Aljallil Abd al Rahman, was a Yemeni citizen imprisoned at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from January 2002 until his death in custody there, ruled a ...

could not be held by the U.S. government. Kennedy found that the government's key piece of evidence, a heavily redacted intelligence report, was not sufficiently reliable to justify Latif's detention. The D.C. Circuit later reversed this ruling, holding that Kennedy should have accorded a presumption of regularity to the report. Commentators have criticized the D.C. Circuit's reversal of Kennedy's reliability holding. *On June 24, 2011, Kennedy issued a ruling addressing the role of the U.S. Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause in federal legislative branch employment lawsuits. He held that the Speech or Debate Clause barred discrimination and retaliation claims that could not be proven without inquiry into internal legislative branch communications, but held that such claims could go forward if the supposedly protected legislative explanation for the challenged employment action could be shown to be pretextual without inquiry into protected legislative activity."Protections for Legislative Branch Employees"
Passman & Kaplan.

References

External links