Reggie Walton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walton’s father worked two jobs in the steel town Donora in which the young Walton appeared in court three times over gang fighting. Walton credits an incident in which a friend nearly killed a rival with an icepick with convincing him to turn towards academics. He won a football scholarship to get his Bachelor of Arts degree from West Virginia State College in 1971, and then a law degree from The American University, Washington College of Law, in 1974. Judge Walton is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.
Walton served as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 1981 to 1989 and from 1991 to 2001. He also served as associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In 2001, he was nominated to be a federal bench by President George W. Bush, and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 2004, Bush appointed him to chair a the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, investigating ways to curb prison rape. In May 2007, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. appointed him to a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[1] Despite his appointments by Republican officials, The Washington Post reported, “fellow judges and lawyers who appear before him say Walton’s decisions do not appear to be guided by politics but by a tough-on-crime mentality.” Walton is known by local defense attorneys as a “long ball hitter” - a judge willing to impose long sentences in order to deter future crimes.[1] In fall 2005, the judge was driving his wife and daughter to the airport for a vacation when he came across an assailant attacking a cab driver on the side of the road. Walton tackled the assailant and subdued him until police arrived. The D.C. police spokesperson noted in response, “God bless Judge Walton. I surely wouldn’t want to mess with him.”[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Libby
CNN News also reported that “At the beginning of Thursday’s [June 5, 2007] hearing, Walton told the court that he had received ‘harassing’ and ‘hateful’ messages[:] ‘In the interest of full disclosure, I have received a number of harassing, angry and mean-spirited phone calls and messages. Some wishing bad things on me and my family,” the judge said. ‘Those types of things will have no impact. … I initially threw them away, but then there were more, some that were more hateful,’ Walton said. ‘They are being kept.’”[43]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby
Several months after Bush’s action, Judge Walton commented publicly on it. He spoke in favor of applying the law equally, and said:
The downside [of the commutation] is there are a lot of people in America who think that justice is determined to a large degree by who you are and that what you have plays a large role in what kind of justice you receive….[121]
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/29598324.html
In the 11th grade, Walton said, he was asked to read to classmates, and it was clear that his reading level was deficient.
Walton’s teacher told him he was too small to play pro football, so he had to improve academically to make it in life. Walton landed a scholarship to play football at West Virginia State University, where he said he improved his studies and graduated with honors.
Walton said he often sentenced people who lacked reading skills. To improve literacy will cost money, but he said it costs many millions to lock up people who have turned to crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby
You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover – Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats, bird flu and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.
With admiration, Scooter Libby.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(book)
Although the sexual passages and references make up only a few pages of the novel, one passage in particular—combining bestiality, pedophilia, prostitution, and biastophilia in just three sentences—has received wide attention:
At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. (81)[9][3]
Another sentence in the book introduces necrophilia, as a hunter copulates with a freshly-killed deer: “The man called out to the others that the deer was still warm. He asked if they should fuck the deer” (127).[10]
In his June 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Presidential pardon of Scooter Libby, conservative academic Fouad Ajami praised The Apprentice as a “remarkably lyrical novel … [which] bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment.”[11]
