Joyce Hens Green, a pioneering woman on the federal bench, dies at 95
Judge Joyce Hens Green, a member of the Senior Lawyers Division, first joined the ABA in 1953. (Photo by James H. Green)
Joyce Hens Green, who helped blaze a trail for women in the law while serving as a Washington attorney and federal judge, presiding over high-profile cases involving the BCCI bank fraud scandal and the rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, died Oct. 10 at an assisted-living community in Towson, Maryland. She was 95.
The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, said her son James H. Green, a Maryland district court judge in Baltimore.
A daughter of Swiss immigrants, Judge Green launched her legal career in 1951 after graduating as one of only six women at George Washington University’s law school. At the time, she said, it was so rare for women to be practicing that when she made her first cellblock visit for a court appointment, “the marshals were astonished—and chortled and yelled to my defendant, ‘Here comes your lady lawyer!’”
Judge Green went on to serve for more than a decade at the D.C. Superior Court, handling domestic disputes and criminal cases as well as labyrinthine tax trials involving the D.C. government.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s nomination led to her becoming only the third woman to serve on the U.S. District Court in Washington, where she ordered the D.C. Superior Court to stop excluding blind people from juries; ruled that the District had neglected to provide adequate health care to Latino prisoners; and won over football fans by resolving a union dispute that threatened to keep 26 Washington Redskins off the field for the team’s 1993 season finale.
While maintaining a full caseload at the district court, Judge Green became the first woman named to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where she ruled on classified intelligence requests and served for five years as the presiding judge. She took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 1995.
‘A longtime mentor’
James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, described her as “a model judge in many ways,” adding that she was known “both for her incisive rulings and her modest and welcoming demeanor on the bench.”
“As one of the first women appointed to our court, she was a longtime mentor to many women lawyers and judges who followed her, some of whom she had hired as law clerks,” he said in a statement.
Judge Joyce Hens Green was appointed to the federal bench in 1979. (Photo from U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia)A few months after she was appointed to the federal bench, Judge Green made national headlines during the Iran hostage crisis, during which she ordered a halt to special immigration checks being conducted on the more than 50,000 Iranians who were studying in the United States. She found that the students’ constitutional rights were being violated—and subsequently faced death threats for her ruling, which was overturned on appeal.
“To single out a particular nationality because of horrendous activity in a distant country was appalling,” she said in a 2001 oral history interview for the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit, comparing the immigration checks to the wartime detainment of Japanese Americans.
Judge Green later sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission in its court battle against Stratton Oakmont, the predatory brokerage house that inspired Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and blocked the approval of a biological warfare lab the Army planned to build in Utah.
She also delivered what was widely described as a first-of-its-kind ruling against a foreign country, declaring that the Chilean government could be sued in connection with the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and a colleague, who were killed in a car bombing in Washington by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Judge Green awarded $4.9 million in damages to the families of the two victims.
After an Air Florida jetliner crashed into Washington’s 14th Street bridge shortly after takeoff in 1982, Judge Green was praised for her diligence and sensitivity in resolving dozens of settlements on behalf of the survivors and the families of the 78 people who were killed.
“She saved everybody years of trial time,” Donald W. Madole, a lawyer who represented many of the crash families, told the Washington Post in 1983. “I know of no other air crash case where it was settled this quickly.”
Some of her most challenging legal work surrounded the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which became known as the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals” after prosecutors uncovered evidence of massive fraud and money laundering.
Judge Green approved a 1992 plea agreement in which the bank gave up $550 million in U.S. assets, described at the time as the biggest forfeiture in the country’s history. She later ordered $393 million of the bank’s assets to be turned over to a fund for victims, and presided over fraud cases involving bank executives such as Swaleh Naqvi, whom she sentenced to more than eight years in prison.
After nearly a decade of work on the BCCI cases, Judge Green largely stepped away from the federal bench. She returned in 2004 for some of the most consequential cases of her career, playing what constitutional and human rights lawyer Jonathan Hafetz described as “a pivotal role” in the early legal battles surrounding the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Opened in the months after 9/11, the prison grew to hold hundreds of suspected terrorists who were detained as “unlawful enemy combatants” and denied basic legal rights and freedoms. After the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that the prisoners could petition federal courts to challenge their detention, Judge Green was assigned to manage more than 60 legal claims from the detainees.
She went on to extend basic legal rights to the prisoners, ruling in 2005 that the men had a constitutional right to due process.
“Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the Commander in Chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats,” she wrote, “that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over two hundred years.”
In her ruling, Judge Green also concluded that a new tribunal process, established by the military to review prisoners’ detentions, was unconstitutional, with detainees unable to determine the exact charges against them and the evidence being cited. She also “questioned whether some of the information used against the detainees had been obtained by torture and was thus unreliable, the first time that problem has been brought up in a judicial opinion,” according to a New York Times report.
“This is a classic illustration of someone speaking truth to power,” Eugene R. Fidell, a military law specialist, told the Post after Judge Green’s ruling. “It’s things like this that make the judiciary the jewel in the crown of our democracy.”
Some of the Guantánamo cases were handled by another federal judge, Richard J. Leon, who issued a more favorable decision for the George W. Bush administration, concluding that the Guantánamo prisoners were not entitled to basic legal rights. The Supreme Court sided broadly with Judge Green, affirming in 2008 that the inmates had a right to challenge their detention.
Legal questions continue to linger for the 30 detainees remaining at the prison.
“The lawyers representing detainees at Guantánamo had tremendous respect for the care and diligence with which she approached these issues,” J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said of Judge Green. Still, he added in a phone interview, “I don’t think she—or any of us, frankly—could have foreseen that those issues she addressed with such thoughtfulness would remain unresolved nearly two decades later. I don’t think anyone could have foreseen that.”
A borrowed robe
The younger of two children, Ruth Joyce Martha Hens was born in New York City on Nov. 13, 1928, and spent her early years in Pelham Manor, N.Y., where the family had a governess, butler and chauffeur.
Her father, a Polish-born psychiatrist who had grown up in Switzerland, had a thriving practice on Park Avenue in Manhattan. He also had a hefty stock portfolio, acquired almost entirely on margin. His holdings were wiped out during the Depression, leading the family to move to a small apartment in the city before settling on the grounds of the state-run Spring Grove hospital in Catonsville, Md., where he got a job as a staff psychiatrist.
Encouraged by her parents to go into medicine, Judge Green enrolled at the University of Maryland at age 16. She was the only woman in her 300-person science classes, where she found that she had little interest in lab work involving cats and inanimate objects. What she wanted, she said, was to deal with people.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1949, Judge Green enrolled in law school, kicking off a chaotic two-year period in which she was briefly paralyzed from the waist down with polio; took two straight summer sessions to race through her course requirements; and took the bar exam early in the hope that she would have some good professional news for her mother, who was dying of cancer.
She was admitted to the bar in 1951, one day before she formally graduated from law school. Her mother died weeks later.
Judge Green became president of the Women’s Bar Association of D.C. and developed a close friendship with June L. Green (no relation), who became the second woman appointed to the district court in Washington. They shared a law office before Judge Green left to start a legal partnership with her husband, Samuel Green, a family-law specialist she had once opposed in court.
They married in 1965, and he died of a heart condition in 1983, at 62.
In addition to her son James, survivors include two other children, Michael Green and Heather Cornett; a stepson, Phillip Green; and 13 grandchildren.
Judge Green said that without her husband, she would never have become a judge. After the birth of their first child in 1967, she decided to retire from the law to devote herself full-time to her family. She was at home that December, caring for her six-month-old son, when she got a call from an old colleague now working at the Justice Department, wanting to know if she might be interested in an opening at the General Sessions Court, a precursor to the D.C. Superior Court.
Her answer was no.
She “promptly turned him down, expressed my joy with life at home, my husband and our child, and the completeness of my life, but thanked him for thinking of me,” she recalled in the oral history. “And then I called my husband and told him what had just happened.”
At his insistence, she called the official back. The next day, she went for an interview and met with Warren Christopher, the deputy attorney general, who allayed some of her concerns by discussing his law-school classmate Shirley Hufstedler, who was serving as a judge in California and later became secretary of education.
“She was married and had a son, and if she could do it, I could do it. Those, literally, were his words,” Judge Green recalled.
Even after Christopher said he would recommend her for the position, Judge Green never believed she would get the job. But three months later, with an appointment from President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmation from the Senate, she started her new career as a judge—wearing a borrowed robe, she said, because there hadn’t been time to get a new one made.
