Meg Kinnard/AP Photo
U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs at work in her chambers on February 18, 2022, in Columbia, South Carolina
District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs is a top contender for the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by outgoing justice Stephen Breyer. If you know that much about her, you likely also know that she’s the preferred nominee of South Carolina’s Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, whose vigorous advocacy for Childs has sometimes veered into dishonesty. Nearly every article regarding Judge Childs’s candidacy has touched in some way on her close relationship with the South Carolina congressman, who has been credited with and rewarded handsomely for reviving Joe Biden’s flagging presidential campaign with a primary endorsement ahead of the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina.
But the nature of Childs and Clyburn’s relationship remains largely unknown. Both are South Carolinians; both attended public universities in the state (Childs is a graduate of the University of South Carolina twice over, and Clyburn went to South Carolina State). Aside from that, little describing Childs’s relationship to Clyburn prior to this charm offensive has been reported.
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But the two have crossed paths in the courtroom before. In 2017, Charles H. Williams II, a lawyer and friend of Clyburn’s, appeared before Judge Childs to contest a sentence handed down by a federal magistrate a year prior. After pleading guilty to baiting, trapping, and killing protected red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks on his 1,790-acre plantation (or ranch, as he preferred it)—in order to maintain a healthy stock of quail for him and his friends to hunt—Williams was ordered by Magistrate Judge Shiva Hodges to pay a $75,000 fine, complete 50 hours of community service at the Center for Birds of Prey in Awendaw, South Carolina, and serve one year of probation, during which time he would be barred from hunting.
Williams pled to seven counts, though 30 carcasses were recovered from his property. Trapping and killing hawks without a permit is a violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, carrying a maximum prison term of six months and a fine of up to $15,000 for each bird killed illegally—which meant that Williams could have come away with a far steeper penalty, with jail time of up to three and a half years for the seven counts he pled to, or 15 years for all 30 hawks.
The prosecution had hoped for more. “These birds (hawks) were killed in a very inhumane way, often allowed to sit in the cages for days while they suffered,” assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Klumb said at the hearing, pushing for a $105,000 fine to send “a strong message” to people like Williams, who was identified as the mastermind of a systematic program to trap those protected birds in the service of his quail hunting. The prosecution similarly suggested that they had evidence of Williams killing “far more than 30 hawks” in a scheme that dated back as far as 2009, where he baited and then executed the birds with a pistol. In a similar South Carolina federal hawk-killing case, the offender ultimately paid $250,000 to local animal charities.
The intervention by Clyburn, long described as a regional and national power broker, is partially explained by the deep political ties that the Williams family maintains in the state.
Still, Williams felt his comparatively light penalty was excessively harsh and decided to appeal, on the grounds that his case should not have been heard by a magistrate judge, that he didn’t know any better, and that Hodges, the magistrate judge, was, in his words, a “bird lover.” “I knew it was against a South Carolina law, but I didn’t know it was federal (law),” Williams said. For the appeal, Williams drew Judge Childs.
Williams again entered a guilty plea. But this time, prior to sentencing, his legal team produced a robust character endorsement, from South Carolina political kingmaker Rep. Clyburn.
In a letter presented to Judge Childs and the court, Clyburn celebrated Williams’s public service as a former trustee at South Carolina State University and as a current trustee at the University of South Carolina, Clyburn’s and Childs’s alma maters. Clyburn called Williams a “major contributor to youth sports and leader in the revitalization in downtown Orangeburg,” and commended his general sense of hospitality. As The State wrote at the time, Clyburn also claimed that “no one in Orangeburg has done more for his community.”
Clyburn wasn’t Williams’s only endorser. His son, David Williams, also testified on his behalf. “I’ve seen him go without a passport for over two years,” because of the magistrate’s initial verdict. “He couldn’t go to Argentina with our family, which he’d already paid for.”
Judge Childs found those endorsements persuasive, and cut the sentence substantially. Williams’s fine was slashed by more than half to $30,000, just $1,000 per hawk carcass retrieved. The hunting ban and community service, meanwhile, were withdrawn entirely. As reported at the time, Williams also dodged what could have been a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Following Clyburn’s suggestion, Judge Childs justified the light resentencing by reiterating that “Williams is an outstanding citizen who does many good works in his community.”
“In his letter, the Congressman asked that the Court consider his assessment of Mr. Williams as ‘an outstanding leader in his community and in the state’ as it determined ‘the most appropriate sentence.’ The Congressman’s letter did not ask for a lesser sentence,” said Hope Derrick, Rep. Clyburn’s communications director, in a statement to the Prospect. But a lesser sentence is exactly what came.
This all makes more sense when one examines South Carolina politics. The intervention by Clyburn, long described as a regional and national power broker, is partially explained by the deep political ties that the Williams family maintains in the state. Charles Williams’s father, Marshall B. Williams, was president pro tempore of the South Carolina state Senate; the two of them co-founded Williams and Williams, the powerful South Carolina firm where Charles II and his sons David and Charlie work. Charles Williams’s late wife, Karen, meanwhile, was a judge on the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia.
Williams and Williams partner Brad Hutto, the attorney who represented Charles Williams II in his suit, is currently state Senate minority leader. In 2020, Clyburn endorsed Hutto’s bid for re-election to the South Carolina state Senate. Clyburn even contributed $10,000 to Hutto for U.S. Senate across two separate payments during the 2013–2014 election cycle, when he challenged Lindsey Graham.
People who weren’t plugged into the South Carolina Democratic Party machine didn’t get such deference, naturally. The light sentencing of Williams stands in sharp contrast to the harsh 12-year sentence Judge Childs handed down to Willie Roy Goodwin in 2009, a Black resident of the state, on a piddling third-strike marijuana charge (first reported by the Prospect). Childs is understood to be a top-two finalist for the Supreme Court nomination, which the Biden administration is expected to announce shortly. We’re about to find out how much sway Clyburn’s character endorsements have with the president.
