1. United States
2. Mo.
3. Letter

OPPOSE the confirmation of William Crain, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He has shown through political campaigning and his career as a judge that he is extremely biased, and he decides cases based on his personal views, not the law. Crain’s decisions harming reproductive rights and people who have reported sexual assault make me concerned that he will apply those biased views to all his rulings instead of treating all cases fairly. During his 2019 campaign for the Louisiana Supreme Court, Crain featured his anti-abortion views prominently on his social media, even though abortions were still allowed federally. In other words, he made campaign promises insinuating that he would make court decisions based on his personal views about abortion, even though the U.S. Supreme Court said otherwise at the time. What makes Crain’s campaign advertising even worse is that he fulfilled his anti-abortion promise in the June Medical v. Laundry case. In this case, many groups were trying to challenge the anti-abortion laws that automatically went into effect in Louisiana after Roe v. Wade was overturned. A judge had temporarily paused Louisiana’s anti-abortion laws because they were vague and conflicting, and the state government tried to get the laws to still go forward. Crain was one of the only two Justices on the Louisiana Supreme Court that agreed with the state. The Louisiana Supreme Court disagreed with Crain because they said it was too early for the state Supreme Court to step in. Yet against the judgment of his fellow Justices, he still voted to have the anti-abortion laws go forward because of his biased political views. In his explanation of his vote, Crain didn’t even mention the impact of anti-abortion laws on pregnant people, as if they didn’t exist or if their bodies didn’t belong to them, he just argued about how unimportant the concerns of the doctors are as compared to the fetuses. 🚨Crain also wrote a callous court decision that allowed for an incarcerated woman to be cruelly punished just for helping her fellow inmate report her sexual assault. In Ray v. LeBlanc, the woman who was helping to report the sexual assault faced retaliation, including solitary confinement and being moved into a maximum-security prison. Judge Crain’s decision in this case validated the prison’s retaliatory actions. Judge Crain is a biased judge who has shown he does not care about the rights of women and vulnerable people, and therefore, I ask that you OPPOSE the confirmation of William Crain to the Eastern District of Louisiana.