LBGTQ rights lawyer indicted for lying during Alabama ‘judge shopping’ inquiry

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By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -An LGBTQ rights attorney has been charged in a federal indictment with lying during a judicial inquiry into whether he and others engaged in “judge shopping” in order to challenge Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.

Carl Charles, an attorney at Lambda Legal, was charged in an indictment unsealed on Monday in federal court in Montgomery, Alabama, months after a judge took the rare step of sanctioning him and referring him for a criminal investigation.

It marks a rare instance of charges being brought related to a widespread practice among both liberal and conservative litigants to steer cases challenging government policies to ideologically sympathetic judges.

Transgender rights have become a major flashpoint in the U.S. culture wars. Federal prosecutors secured the indictment amid a broader push by the U.S. Department of Justice under Republican President Donald Trump to investigate providers of medical gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Charles, who worked in the Justice Department during the tenure of Democratic President Joe Biden, pleaded not guilty on Monday to making a false statement before a court. 

Lambda Legal in a statement said it stood behind Charles and called the indictment “an outrageous act of governmental overreach.” Charles’ lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. 

Charles was one of three lawyers sanctioned in February by U.S. District Judge Liles Burke after pursuing legal challenges to Republican-led Alabama’s ban on the use of puberty-blocking drugs and hormones to treat gender dysphoria in transgender minors. 

Burke, a Trump appointee, said the lawyers tried to “game the system” by dropping two cases they filed in 2022 when they were assigned to him and then mounting a new legal challenge in a different federal district court in Alabama.

A 2024 report by a three-judge panel that investigated whether the three lawyers engaged in misconduct by attempting to circumvent procedures designed to have cases randomly assigned to a judge found they did so because they viewed Burke as a “bad draw.”

The new case was reassigned to Burke, who despite their concerns blocked the law’s enforcement, though an appeals court later reinstated it.

The indictment alleges that during the judicial inquiry, Charles falsely testified that he had not called a judge’s chambers in April 2022 about the assignment of the lawsuit with which he was involved.

According to Burke’s ruling, Charles later amended his answers to state he actually called a judge’s clerk. He apologized for his earlier response.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)