By Katelynn Richardson
A federal judge sanctioned three attorneys on Tuesday, including one who spent time in former President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), for judge shopping.
Judge Liles C. Burke, appointed by President Donald Trump, imposed sanctions on three of the eleven attorneys a three-judge panel in 2024 found attempted to steer their case challenging Alabama’s ban on child sex changes to a more friendly judge.
“The lead attorneys in this case — a high-profile challenge to Alabama state law—tried to avoid their assigned judge by voluntarily dismissing one case and filing anew with different plaintiffs in a neighboring federal district court,” Burke wrote in the 230-page order. “This was not just a strategic litigation decision; it was a calculated effort to subvert the rule of law.”
While some attorneys have “shown genuine contrition for their misconduct,” Burke wrote that the sanctioned three refused to accept responsibility and tried to “shift the blame for their misconduct to the judiciary.”
Melody Eagan and Jeffrey Doss, attorneys at the Lightfoot, Franklin & White firm, were disqualified from participating in the case and referred to the Alabama State Bar.
Carl Charles, a transgender-identifying attorney who worked at the Biden DOJ before returning to Lambda Legal, where she worked at the time of the judge shopping incident, was fined $5,000. Burke reprimanded Charles for her “repeated, intentional, bad-faith misrepresentations of key facts to the three-judge panel about his call to Judge Thompson’s chambers.”
Burke also referred Charles to the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama for criminal investigation. (RELATED: Top Biden Officials Who Helped Weaponize DOJ Land Cushy University Gigs)
“Charles stood before this Court and testified just as he testified before the Panel—with his pants on fire,” Burke wrote.
“No case is worth the price of one’s integrity; and yet Melody Eagan, Jeffrey Doss, and Carl Charles chose to gamble with theirs,” Burke wrote. “Inexplicably, they decided it was worth the risk.”
Lambda Legal, Carl Charles, Jeffrey Doss and Melody Eagan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That’s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
A gender transition can result in a lifetime of pain, discomfort, and medications, such as hormone therapy. As Britain’s National Health Service explains, hormones “need to be taken for the rest of your life, even if you have gender surgery.” The FDA notes that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and vision loss, and an FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
Jazz Jennings is the most famous kid to undergo a gender transition, with a long-running TV show celebrating Jazz’s gender transition. Health providers falsely said that a sex change would make Jazz happy, and falsely told Jazz’s mother that Jazz was at risk for suicide if she didn’t allow Jazz to transition. “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?,” they asked Jazz’s mother, peddling a talking point that is often used on parents of transgender teens.
But by 2023, Jazz was miserable. Jazz’s penis was surgically removed at age 17, after Jazz was put on puberty blockers at age 11. Jazz became depressed, saying “I don’t feel like me, ever.” After Jazz’s sex change, Jazz experienced pain, constant reflux, a lack of sex drive, an inability to orgasm, rapid weight gain, and mental illness.
