William B. Bryant

William Benson Bryant (September 18, 1911 – November 13, 2005) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and served as the first African-American Chief Judge of the court.

Early life, education and military service

Born in Wetumpka, Alabama, Bryant attended local schools. His parents encouraged his education and he studied political science at Howard University, a historically black college, graduating with an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1932. Bryant earned his Bachelor of Laws from Howard University School of Law in 1936, graduating first in his class. Following law school, Bryant served as chief research assistant to Ralph Bunche, then Chair of the Department of Political Science at Howard, while Bunche worked with Gunnar Myrdal on his 1944 study of American race relations An American Dilemma. Bryant served as an officer in the United States Army during World War II, from 1943 to 1947, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Legal career

Bryant entered private practice in Washington, D.C., in 1948 and became a named partner at the firm headed by Charles Hamilton Houston, who had been dean of Howard Law School and served as legal counsel for the NAACP. At the time, the D.C. bar was still closed to African Americans. In the case, Andrew Roosevelt Mallory, 19, had confessed to rape after 7½ hours of interrogation in a police station. He was convicted and sentenced to death. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court overturned Mallory's conviction because his arraignment was not accomplished "without unnecessary delay," violating the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Bryant scheduled a new election to be held in December 1972 and required that the United States Department of Labor oversee the election to ensure fairness. The winner of the disputed vote, W. A. Boyle, was defeated in the ensuing election; he was later convicted of Yablonski's murder.

Bryant held in 1975 that Washington's height requirement for firefighters was illegal, in 1979 that the government's searches of the offices of the Church of Scientology were unconstitutional, and was the first judge to order President Richard Nixon to turn over his audiotapes in connection with civil lawsuits in the Watergate affair. In Inmates of D.C. Jail v. Jackson, he found that conditions in D.C. jails violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." He said that he had listened to corrections officials' promises of improvement "since the Big Dipper was a thimble."

Honors

In 2003, his fellow judges at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had requested that the new annex at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse be named after him. This proposal was signed into law by President George W. Bush two days before Judge Bryant's death in 2005.