A federal judge sanctioned three attorneys on Tuesday, including one who spent time in former President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), for judge shopping.
Judge Liles C. Burke, appointed by President Donald Trump, imposed sanctions on three of the eleven attorneys a three-judge panel in 2024 found attempted to steer their case challenging Alabama’s ban on child sex changes to a more friendly judge.
“The lead attorneys in this case — a high-profile challenge to Alabama state law—tried to avoid their assigned judge by voluntarily dismissing one case and filing anew with different plaintiffs in a neighboring federal district court,” Burke wrote in the 230-page order. “This was not just a strategic litigation decision; it was a calculated effort to subvert the rule of law.”
While some attorneys have “shown genuine contrition for their misconduct,” Burke wrote that the sanctioned three refused to accept responsibility and tried to “shift the blame for their misconduct to the judiciary.”
Melody Eagan and Jeffrey Doss, attorneys at the Lightfoot, Franklin & White firm, were disqualified from participating in the case and referred to the Alabama State Bar.
Carl Charles, a transgender-identifying attorney who worked at the Biden DOJ before returning to Lambda Legal, where she worked at the time of the judge shopping incident, was fined $5,000. Burke reprimanded Charles for her “repeated, intentional, bad-faith misrepresentations of key facts to the three-judge panel about his call to Judge Thompson’s chambers.”
Burke also referred Charles to the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama for criminal investigation.
“Charles stood before this Court and testified just as he testified before the Panel—with his pants on fire,” Burke wrote.
“No case is worth the price of one’s integrity; and yet Melody Eagan, Jeffrey Doss, and Carl Charles chose to gamble with theirs,” Burke wrote. “Inexplicably, they decided it was worth the risk.”
Lambda Legal, Carl Charles, Jeffrey Doss and Melody Eagan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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