William Holcombe Pryor Jr. (born April 26, 1962) is an American lawyer who has served as the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit since 2020. He was appointed as a United States circuit judge of the court by President George W. Bush in 2004. He is a former commissioner of the United States Sentencing Commission. Previously, he was the attorney general of Alabama, from 1997 to 2004.

Early life and education

Pryor was born in 1962 in Mobile, Alabama, the son of William Holcombe Pryor and Laura Louise Bowles. Pryor was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. He and his siblings attended McGill–Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile. Pryor attended Northeast Louisiana University (now University of Louisiana at Monroe) on a band scholarship, graduating in 1984 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended Tulane University Law School. He became editor-in-chief of the Tulane Law Review and graduated in 1987 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude.

Legal career

After law school, Pryor served as a law clerk to judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1987 to 1988. He then entered private practice with the Birmingham, Alabama, law firm Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner, Dumas & O'Neal. He also served as an adjunct professor of maritime law at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University from 1989 to 1995. Pryor is currently a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University.

Political career

In 1994, Pryor was introduced to Jeff Sessions, who was then campaigning to become the attorney general of Alabama. Sessions won, and from 1995 to 1997 Pryor served as Alabama's deputy attorney general. When Sessions became a U.S. Senator in 1997, Alabama Governor Fob James made Pryor the state's Attorney General. He was, at that time, the youngest state attorney general in the United States. Pryor was elected in 1998 and reelected in 2002. At reelection, Pryor received nearly 59% of the vote, the highest percentage of any statewide candidate. Pryor received national attention in 2003 when he called for the removal of Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, who had disobeyed a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama judicial building. Pryor said that although he agreed with the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, he was bound to follow the court order and uphold the rule of law. Pryor personally prosecuted Moore for violations of the canons of judicial ethics, and the Alabama Court of the Judiciary unanimously removed Moore from office. Pryor was criticized for his refusal to reopen the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, an Alabama man whose 1985 conviction was vacated in 2015. In 2014, the United States Supreme Court held that Hinton's trial lawyer was "constitutionally deficient" because he failed to research how much money he could obtain for an expert witness. The expert that Hinton's lawyer obtained on the cheap was insufficiently qualified. Hinton was released on April 3, 2015, after the State of Alabama could not gather enough evidence for a retrial. In 2002, Pryor opposed Hinton's attempts to challenge his conviction, stating that Hinton's new experts "did not prove [his] innocence and the state does not doubt his guilt."

Federal judicial service

Eleventh Circuit nomination and confirmation

Pryor was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit by president George W. Bush on April 9, 2003, to fill a seat vacated by judge Emmett Ripley Cox, who had assumed senior status. Originally, William H. Steele had been nominated to the seat in 2001, but his nomination had become stalled in the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee during the 107th United States Congress because African-American groups protested his decisions in two civil rights cases as a magistrate judge. His nomination was withdrawn in January 2003. Pryor was nominated as Steele's replacement. Despite the fact that the 108th United States Congress was controlled by the Republican Party, Senate Democrats refused to allow Pryor to be confirmed, criticizing him as an extremist, citing statements he had made such as referring to the Supreme Court as "nine octogenarian lawyers" and saying that Roe v. Wade was the "worst abomination in the history of constitutional law." During the confirmation hearing, Pryor was criticized in particular for filing an amicus brief in 2003 on behalf of the state of Alabama in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas that urged the Court to uphold Texas penal code § 21.06, which classifies homosexual sex as a misdemeanor. Pryor wrote in the brief that "this Court has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy," further arguing that the recognition of a constitutional right to sodomy would "logically extend" to activities like "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and pedophilia." Due to a filibuster of his nomination, George W. Bush installed Pryor as a circuit court judge on February 20, 2004, using a recess appointment to bypass the regular Senate confirmation process. Pryor resigned as Alabama's attorney general that same day and took his judicial oath for a term lasting until the end of the first session of the 109th Congress (December 22, 2005), when his appointment would have ended had he not been eventually confirmed. On May 23, 2005, senator John McCain announced an agreement between seven Republican and seven Democratic U.S. senators, the Gang of 14, to ensure an up-or-down vote on Pryor and two other stalled Bush nominees, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. On June 9, 2005, Pryor was confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit by a 53–45 vote. Pryor received his commission on June 10, 2005. On June 20, 2005, he was sworn in at the age of 43.

Sentencing commission service

President Barack Obama nominated Pryor to serve as a commissioner on the United States Sentencing Commission on April 15, 2013. Pryor had experience with sentencing issues and reform at the state level. During his tenure as attorney general of Alabama, he successfully led the effort to establish, by legislation, the Alabama sentencing commission. Pryor has written several law review articles about his experiences with sentencing reform. The Senate unanimously confirmed Pryor by voice vote on June 6, 2013, and he served a term that expired on October 31, 2017. On January 3, 2017, Pryor was named the Acting Chair of the Commission. Pryor continued to serve as an active judge on the Eleventh Circuit during his service on the Commission.

Misconduct investigation

In January 2022, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out a complaint against Pryor and a District Court Judge, Corey Maze, for their hiring of Crystal Clanton. The complaint alleged that Pryor hired Clanton despite knowledge of reports that she had sent multiple racist texts to colleagues in her student group, Turning Point USA, including one reading "I hate Black People." After working at Turning Point USA, Clanton had lived with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, who wrote a letter to the Second Circuit stating that "She is a good and decent young woman who has had to overcome some challenging difficulties in life only to be smeared by others who would collapse if this happened to their own children.” On July 8, 2022, the Judicial Conference's Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability sent the case back to the Second Circuit, writing that "[b]ecause a special committee was not appointed to investigate the complaints, there is not enough information in the record to determine how the matter should be concluded." The case was sent back with instructions to "[a]t a minimum ... attempt to interview the candidate and the witnesses identified in the media reports." But on October 31, 2023, the Second Circuit unanimously declined to disturb its earlier decision. Based on guidance that it received from the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the Second Circuit ruled that its original decision dismissing the complaint against Pryor and Maze was "final and conclusive."

Notable opinions

Supreme Court consideration

On May 16, 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump released a list of eleven individuals from which he would pick to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by the death of Antonin Scalia, including Pryor. At a Republican primary debate in South Carolina, Trump said the following about Supreme Court nominations "we could have a Diane Sykes or you could have a Bill Pryor, we have some fantastic people." It was reported in mid-December that Trump had narrowed his choices to "three or four individuals", with the top two leading candidates being Sykes and Pryor. Trump announced Neil Gorsuch for his pick for the Court on January 31, 2017.