Clarence Cooper (born May 5, 1942) is a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia of the Federal Judiciary of the United States. He was appointed to this seat on May 9, 1994 by President Bill Clinton. Cooper was born in Decatur, Georgia.
Cooper was the first African-American appointed to a full-time judgeship on the Atlanta Municipal Court and the first African-American ever elected to a county-wide judgeship on the Fulton Superior Court. He was also the first African American assistant district attorney hired to a State Prosecutor's office in Georgia in 1968. Judge Cooper was the presiding Judge in the trial of convicted Atlanta child murderer, Wayne Williams, for serial killings that occurred in 1979 through 1981.
Cooper ordered an Atlanta school system to remove stickers from textbooks which call the theory of evolution "a theory, not a fact." In the case Selman v. Cobb County School District, he ruled that these stickers are an endorsement of religion and as such violate the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.[1]
Cooper is currently assigned to the case of Whitaker v. Perdue, a federal challenge to Georgia House Bill 1059 which requires that registered sexual offenders cannot live or work within 1,000 feet from schools, school bus stops, churches, day care centers, and areas where children gather, such as parks, recreation centers, playgrounds, swimming pools, etc. In July 2006, Judge Cooper issued a restraining order barring enforcement of the law near the vicinity of bus stops. In August, he certified a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all of Georgia's 11,000 registered sex offenders instead of just the eight plaintiffs. On March 30, 2007, the judge dismissed some of the plaintiff's claims from the suit, including the claim that the law represented cruel and unusual punishment; the rest of the case will go forward. Plaintiff's lawyers have until June 1 to file a new, revised complaint.