Biden’s third nominee is confirmed to Ninth Circuit
Gabriel Sanchez, a state appeals court justice in San Francisco, was confirmed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a near party-line Senate vote Wednesday, becoming President Biden’s third appointee to the nation’s largest federal appellate court.
Sanchez won confirmation on a 52-47 vote, with Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Lisa Murfederal kowski of Alaska joining 49 Democrats in supporting him, with one absence.
He succeeds Judge Marsha Berzon of San Francisco, who is transferring to senior status with a reduced caseload.
Sanchez, 45, spent six years as deputy legal affairs secretary for Gov. Jerry Brown, a fellow Yale Law School alumnus, before Brown appointed him to the First District Court of Appeal in 2018.
During Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination, some Republicans criticized Sanchez for his role in helping to draft Proposition 57, an initiative sponsored by Brown and approved by voters in 2016. It made thousands of California prisoners eligible for earlier parole consideration if they had been sentenced to felonies the law classified as nonviolent, and also allowed judges, instead of prosecutors, to decide whether youths ages 14 to 18 should be charged as adults for serious crimes.
Sanchez told the senators he had simply been doing his job carrying out Brown’s policies.
“When I took the role of a judge on the appellate court, I left all that behind,” he said at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, according to coverage by the National Law Journal.
Rakim H.D. Brooks, president of the civil rights organization Alliance for Justice, praised Wednesday’s confirmation vote. Sanchez “has spent his career advocating on behalf of people who need access to equal justice under the law the most,” he said.
Another Ninth Circuit judge, M. Margaret McKeown, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, announced Tuesday that she will take senior status when her successor is confirmed, creating another vacancy for Biden to fill.
The San Franciscobased Ninth Circuit, which hears appeals of federal cases in nine Western states, has 29 judges, 16 of them appointed by Democratic presidents.
All four of Biden’s nominees to the court — Sanchez, Lucy Koh, Jennifer Sung and Holly Thomas — have been racial minorities.
Koh, a federal judge in San Jose, and Sung, a labor lawyer and state regulatory official in Oregon, were confirmed on close Senate votes.
Thomas, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge and a former NAACP attorney, kept her nomination alive on an evenly split Judiciary Committee vote last month and could come up for Senate confirmation early next week, said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who monitors judicial nominations.