Thelton Henderson

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Thelton Eugene Henderson (born 1933, Shreveport, Louisiana) is currently a federal judge in the Northern District of California. He has played an important role in advancing civil rights as a lawyer, educator, and jurist.

Henderson received both his undergraduate and law degrees from University of California, Berkeley. In 1962, he became the Justice Department's first African-American lawyer in the Civil Rights Division. He was sent to the South to monitor local law enforcement for any civil rights abuses, a role that included investigating the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church which killed four girls. In this capacity he became acquainted with Martin Luther King and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, after winning over their initial skepticism of a government attorney.

After a stint in private practice, he served as director of a legal aid center in East Palo Alto, California. In 1969, he became assistant dean at Stanford Law School, where he established the minority recruiting program and helped diversify the student body, and assisted in creating Stanford's clinical program. During this time, he also served as consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Office of Economic Opportunity, Carnegie Corporation, and Ford Foundation. In 1977, he left Stanford to form a law firm which specialized in civil rights, civil liberties and other issues of constitutional law, and also was a law professor at Golden Gate University.

In June 1980, he was appointed by President Carter as U.S. District Court Judge. From 1990 to 1997, Henderson served as Chief Judge for the Northern District of California. Since 1998, he has served as Senior Judge.

In the late 1980s, Henderson presided over a long-running case over the fishing industry's practice of snaring dolphins in its tuna nets. Environmental groups charged that millions of dolphins had drowned because of the industry's refusal to follow existing safety regulations. He also rejected attempts by the Clinton and Bush administrations to relax legal standards on fishing practices and loosen dolphin-safe labeling on tuna.

In a landmark 1995 civil rights case, Madrid v. Gomez, Henderson found the use of force and level of medical care at the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison unconstitutional. During its subsequent federal oversight process, Henderson was known to visit the prison personally.

In a 1997 decision, he struck down Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action California initiative, as unconstitutional. He was criticized by many supporters of Proposition 209, and the next year a three-judge Court of Appeals panel overturned his decision.

In July 2005, Henderson found that substandard medical care in the California prison system violated prisoners' rights and led to unnecessary injuries and deaths in California prisons. He agreed to appoint an administrator to take over the health care system. The state did not dispute the factual allegations.

In addition to his official work, he went to South Africa in 1985 with fellow judge Leon Higginbotham as a judicial observer and guest of the nation's black lawyers association. While there he was briefly detained and interrogated by white policemen.

Among his awards are the State Bar of California's Bernard Witkin Medal, the Pearlstein Civil Rights Award from the Anti-Defamation League, the Distinguished Service Award by the National Bar Association, and the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Award for Professionalism and Ethics from the American Inns of Court.

A documentary on his life, Soul of Justice, was released in late 2005.