John C. Coughenour (b. 1941 (age 70–71)) is a U.S. District Court Judge.[1] He was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981.[2]
Before being appointed as a judge, Coughenour was a leading litigator with Bogle & Gates and has taught trial and appellate practice at the University of Washington School of Law.[3]
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| B.S. | 1963 | Kansas State College of Pittsburg |
| J.D. | 1966 | University of Iowa College of Law |
Coughenour entered private practice in 1966.[2] Coughenour was an assistant professor of law, at the University of Washington, from 1970 to 1973. He was a Chief Judge from 1997-2004. He became a Senior Judge in 2006.
Coughenour testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 7 April 2004 and 4 June 2008.[4][5][6]
In 1995 Coughenour found Washington State's Sexually Violent Predator Law to be "criminal in nature".[7] He ruled the law unconstitutionally violated protections against post facto laws and double jeopardy.
Coughenour was the judge who first sentenced Ahmed Ressam, the "millennium bomber", who had been convicted by a jury after being found with materials that an explosives expert concluded could have produced a blast 40x greater than that of a devastating car bomb, and plans to use it to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999.
Ressam wrote a letter to Coughenour, in November 2006, to "clarify" allegations he leveled against "Ahcene Zemiri", another Algerian expatriate he knew from when they both lived in Montreal.
Coughenour wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "How to Try a Terrorist", commenting on Michael B. Mukasey's nomination for Attorney General of the United States.[8] Coughenour compared his experience trying Ahmed Ressam with Michael B. Mukasey's trial of Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He noted that Mukasey had complained about “the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism prosecutions.” He noted that Mukasey had complained about the limited number of terrorism convictions.[8] Coughenour paraphrased Mukasey: “Open prosecutions… potentially disclose to our enemies methods and sources of intelligence-gathering. Our Constitution does not adequately protect society from 'people who have cosmic goals that they are intent on achieving by cataclysmic means.'” Coughenour wrote that his experience[8]: “only strengthened my conviction that American courts, guided by the principles of our Constitution, are fully capable of trying suspected terrorists.”
On July 27, 2005, Coughenour sentenced Ressam to 22 years in prison, plus 5 years of supervision after his release.[9] On February 2, 2010, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 22-year sentence Coughenour had handed down was too lenient, and did not fit in the then-mandatory sentencing guidelines which indicated Ressam should have received at least 65 years, and up to 130 years, in prison. The court ordered that Ressam be re-sentenced by a different district court judge than Coughenour.[10]
In 1995, Coughenour also presided over the civil trial of the Jason Scott case, which resulted in damages awarded against the Cult Awareness Network and deprogrammer Rick Ross.[11]