Jenkins becomes 1st openly gay justice on state high court
Martin Jenkins, a judicial veteran and legal adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, was confirmed by a state commission Tuesday to the California Supreme Court, where he becomes the first openly gay justice.
Jenkins, who turned 67 on Thursday, was a judge on state and federal courts for 30 years before leaving the bench in January 2019 to become Newsom’s judicial appointments secretary. Newsom nominated him last month to succeed Justice Ming Chin, who retired Aug. 31 after 24 years on the court.
The Commission on Judicial Appointments approved his nomination by a 30 vote after receiving a State Bar panel’s report that gave Jenkins the bar’s top rating of “exceptionally wellqualified.” The commission’s members are Chief Justice Tani CantilSakauye, Attorney General Xavier Becerra and J. Anthony Kline, the senior presiding justice on state appeals courts.
Jenkins is the fifth African American justice in the court’s history. The current court has one other African American, Justice Leondra Kruger, and one Latino, two Asian Americans, and only one white male, Justice Joshua Groban, who was a legal adviser to thenGov. Jerry Brown.
“Living his truth about being African American and gay,” Jenkins “knows what it means … to struggle and to be an outsider,” William McGuiness, a retired state appeals court justice in San Francisco and former colleague of Jenkins’, said at the commission’s onehour hearing in San Francisco.
Another former colleague, retired U. S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, said Jenkins was known during his 10 years on the federal bench as “the James Brown of the judiciary,” referring to the late soul singer’s reputation as “the hardestworking man in show business.”
While the hearing was devoid of conflict, with no opposing witnesses, it occurred at a tumultuous time for the courts, as Kline, who also served alongside Jenkins, observed.
“There has never been a time like today, in which the rule of law is challenged at the highest levels of our government,” Kline said during the hearing.
Jenkins is a San Francisco native who grew up in the Ingleside neighborhood and attended St. Michael’s Catholic School in the Ocean View neighborhood, while his father worked as a clerk and janitor at Coit Tower. A standout football player at Santa Clara University, he briefly played cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL before enrolling in law school at the University of San Francisco.
After graduating in 1980, he practiced law as an Alameda County prosecutor, a U. S. Justice Department civil rights lawyer and a Pacific Bell trial attorney before his appointment to the Oakland Municipal Court by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1989.
A registered Democrat, Jenkins received judicial appointments from Republican governors, including Deukmejian; Pete Wilson, who appointed him to the Alameda County Superior Court in 1992; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who named him to the state’s First District Court of Appeal in 2008.
In between, Democratic President Bill Clinton appointed Jenkins in 1997 to the U. S. District Court in San Francisco, a position he resigned to return to the state courts.
In brief remarks at the hearing, Jenkins mentioned relatives now in their 80s and 90s, and said, “Any concerns about my longevity should be put to rest.”
His judicial record is largely moderate. As a state appellate justice, Jenkins wrote a 2016 ruling that rejected a challenge by education groups to California’s anemic level of school funding and declared, for a 21 majority, that the state Constitution does not guarantee students an education of “some quality.”
As a federal judge, Jenkins authorized a classaction suit by as many as 1.5 million women claiming pay discrimination by Walmart. But the Supreme Court dismissed the suit in 2011, saying the women did not have enough in common for a joint lawsuit.
His confirmation gives
Democratic appointees a 52 majority on the state’s high court. But the current court generally reaches agreement across ideological lines, and nearly 90% of its rulings this year have been unanimous.
Upcoming dockets include a San Francisco case in which the court will decide, after voters’ decision this month to maintain the cash bail system, whether judges must set bail in an amount that a defendant can afford. The court will also review a death penalty case in which Newsom filed arguments saying California’s death penalty law has been racist in its application, and has called for changes in sentencing standards and jury instructions.
Jenkins was confirmed for the balance of Chin’s term, which runs through 2022, and then could seek a new 12year term. The job pays $ 261,949 a year.