Gladys Kessler

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Image:Gladys Kessler listens to students during Operation Open Door

Gladys Kessler is an United States District Court Judge for the District of Columbia.^[1] She was nominated to the court by President Clinton, a Democrat, and is known as one of the most liberal judges in the D.D.C. Judge Kessler was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in July 1994.

After receiving her B.A. from Cornell University and LL.B. from Harvard Law School, she was hired by the National Labor Relations Board. She worked as a Legislative Assistant to Democrat U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, later convicted in the Abscam scandal, and Democrat U.S. Congressman Jonathan B. Bingham, worked for the New York City Board of Education, and then opened a public interest law firm. In June 1977, she was appointed Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and from 1981 to 1985, served as Presiding Judge of the Family Division. She was President of the National Association of Women Judges from 1983 to 1984, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the ABA’s Conference of Federal Trial Judges and the U.S. Judicial Conference's Committee on Court Administration and Management. From 1983 to 1984 she was also the President of the National Association of Women Judges.

Kessler is the first judge to consider an appeal that the Executive branch is violating the new Detainee Treatment Act.^[2] Lawyers for Mohammad Bawazir argued that the measures Camp Delta authorities instituted to break a six-month hunger strike were abusive, cruel and unusual. Department of Defense spokesmen argued that the Detainee Treatment Act didn't apply to suspects held captive in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.^[3]

On October 10, 2007, the Washington Post headlined "Judge Orders U.S. Not to Transfer Tunisian Detainee," and reported that Judge Kessler "ruled last week that Mohammed Abdul Rahman cannot be sent [from Guantanamo] to Tunisia because he could suffer 'irreparable harm." The detainee's lawyer said, "The executive has now been told it cannot bury its Guantanamo mistakes in Third World prisons." He also stated that, "This is the first time the judicial branch has exercised its inherent power to control the excesses of the executive as to treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay."