A federal judge in Texas engaged in improper conduct but will face no discipline for making disparaging remarks about women attorneys and permanently barring a female prosecutor from his courtroom. Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that no further action was necessary to address a judicial misconduct complaint filed against Senior U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston.
In an order made public last week, Richman explained that Hughes had assumed senior status in February 2023, a form of semi-retirement for judges. He relinquished all of his cases and stopped being assigned new ones. Richman deemed addressing the complaint unnecessary under these circumstances.
As is common in federal judicial misconduct cases, Richman’s order did not identify Hughes by name or disclose the identity of the complainant, whom she described only as a “governmental entity.” However, her order detailed events that matched prior decisions by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit related to remarks Hughes made to a female prosecutor in two different cases before him.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility wrote to Richman’s predecessor as chief judge in 2019 to report Hughes’ conduct, according to records provided to the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Such referrals by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to judicial disciplinary authorities are rare, with only six documented in the agency’s annual reports from 2019 to 2023. Hughes and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Republican former President Ronald Reagan appointed Hughes to the bench in 1985. By the time Hughes took senior status, he had been involved in at least five cases in which the 5th Circuit, after reversing his rulings, took the rare step of reassigning cases to other judges.
In 2017, Hughes dismissed an indictment charging the owner of an adoption agency with fraud, citing mistakes by the prosecution in turning over potentially favorable evidence to the defense. Hughes told the female prosecutor on the case that she was “supposed to know what you’re doing,” and added, “It was a lot simpler when you guys wore dark suits, white shirts, and navy ties… We didn’t let girls do it in the old days.”
A 5th Circuit panel reversed the dismissal of that indictment in 2018 and, in a footnote, called Hughes’ comments about women “demeaning, inappropriate, and beneath the dignity of a federal judge.” When the same female prosecutor appeared before Hughes in another criminal case, he “excused” her from the courtroom and told then-U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick she was not welcome in his courtroom ever again.
The 5th Circuit vacated the exclusion order in 2022, with U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho, in a concurring opinion, stating that Hughes appeared to have banned her as punishment for the appeal in the adoption case.
