Colorful judge presided over high-profile cases
Norfolk native ruled in Cole bombing, Gavin Grimm suits
U.S. District Court Judge Robert G. Doumar, a storied and controversial figure who sat on the bench in Norfolk for 42 years, died Saturday morning. He was 93.
Doumar was born in Norfolk in 1930. His father, George Doumar, immigrated from Syria in 1901 and his mother later arrived from Lebanon in an arranged marriage, according to a profile on the website Arab America.
His family has operated Doumar’s Cones and Barbeque in Norfolk since 1934, and lays claim to the invention of the waffle ice cream cone. The judge’s uncle, Abe Doumar, thought up the combination after meeting a waffle maker at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. On a whim, he rolled ice cream into the waffle, and the cone was born, according to the eatery’s website.
Doumar received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in 1951 and law degree from the university’s School of Law in 1953. He served in the Army from 1953-55 and owned a private practice until 1981, when President Ronald Reagan appointed him to
the bench of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia.
Over the years, Doumar presided over many high-profile cases, and was known for his blunt opinions. In 2017, he made headlines when he remarked that child pornography producers should be shot.
“I said it. I said that they should be shot,” he told a Virginian-Pilot reporter at the time. “I feel very strongly on this. They are not fit to live in our society.”
He also oversaw a 2007 lawsuit to hold Sudan liable for the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured dozens. Doumar found the Sudanese government responsible in the terrorist attack and ordered it to pay families of the slain American soldiers about $8
million, far less than the $105 million they were seeking.
In legal circles, Doumar was known for telling colorful stories from the bench, and for his penchant for interrupting attorneys, according to past Pilot stories. That behavior, however, drew criticism from lawyers and higher courts.
In 2015, ALCU attorneys representing Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy who sued the Gloucester County School Board over his right to use his school’s male restroom asked the appellate court to reassign their case to another judge. The attorneys complained that Doumar repeatedly said in court that their client had a “mental disorder” and that they were more interested in gaining media attention than representing the boy’s best interests.
“I’m having a huge problem with everybody knowing that he desires to be a male and, in fact, his attorney advertising that to the world,” said Doumar, who eventually ruled against the boy.
In 2002, Doumar took on the Pentagon after an American-born man caught on an Iranian battlefield was jailed as an “enemy combatant” and denied access to a lawyer. Doumar ordered the Department of Defense to turn over all records related to Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen only because he was born in Louisiana while his father worked in the U.S. The case went to the Supreme Court, and Hamdi was eventually released and stripped of his U.S. citizenship.
Doumar was sensitive about people thinking his Arab background colored his view of the cases before him on the bench, the Washington Post wrote in 2002.
“We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us,” Doumar wrote in ruling on the Hamdi case. “We must preserve the rights afforded to us by our Constitution.”
The Doumar family has not released information about his death. H.D. Oliver Funeral Apartments in Norfolk said the judge is in its care would meet with the family today.