Henry H. Kennedy Jr.

Education and career

Federal judicial service

Personal life

Notable cases

• In November 2007, Kennedy ordered the Bush White House to preserve its emails.
• On January 9, 2008, Kennedy rejected a request from terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay seeking a court hearing into the destruction of interrogation tapes by the CIA in 2005.
• On August 16, 2010, Kennedy ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainee Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif could not be held by the U.S. government. Kennedy found that the government's key piece of evidence, a heavily redacted intelligence report, was not sufficiently reliable to justify Latif's detention. The D.C. Circuit later reversed this ruling, holding that Kennedy should have accorded a presumption of regularity to the report. Commentators have criticized the D.C. Circuit's reversal of Kennedy's reliability holding.
• On June 24, 2011, Kennedy issued a ruling addressing the role of the U.S. Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause in federal legislative branch employment lawsuits. He held that the Speech or Debate Clause barred discrimination and retaliation claims that could not be proven without inquiry into internal legislative branch communications, but held that such claims could go forward if the supposedly protected legislative explanation for the challenged employment action could be shown to be pretextual without inquiry into protected legislative activity.