WASHINGTON U.S. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the cantankerous jurist who presided over the Microsoft antitrust case and the drug trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, and threatened NCUA with a contempt charge after suggesting it was a “rogue” federal agency, died at his home outside Washington Saturday from complications of cancer at 76.
The gruff Jackson handled a variety of famous cases during his more than two decades on the federal bench, sending Mayor Barry to prison for cocaine possession, conducting the perjury trial of former White House aide Michael Deaver, and ordering then-Sen. Bob Packwood to turn over his diaries to a committee investigating sexual harassment charges. It was his ruling in a 1996 field of membership suit by the bankers that sped the case to the Supreme Court, which eventually struck down the NCUA policy as illegal.
During a 1996 hearing on one of the bankers’ numerous suits challenging NCUA’s multiple groups FOM policy, an angry Judge Jackson upbraided NCUA attorneys for what he asserted was their “collusion” with CUNA and NAFCU in efforts to evade his order restricting credit union membership and expansion.
"I have to decide whether I’m dealing with a rogue federal agency here,'' Jackson said to one NCUA lawyer, adding he was considering referring the case to the U.S. attorney to see whether laws had been broken. ''I think the allegations are extremely serious,'' he said during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The long-running FOM dispute with the bankers was eventually taken up by the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1996 that NCUA’s multiple groups’ policy violated the Federal CU Act requiring credit unions to have a single common bond. The ruling was eventually overturned by legislation, HR 1151, the 1998 CU Membership Access Act.
In 2000, ruling in a closely watched antitrust lawsuit brought by the government against Microsoft, Judge Jackson ordered the software giant to be split in two after concluding the company had stifled competition and used illegal methods to protect its monopoly in computer operating systems. The decision, which was later overturned, rocked the software industry, and in interviews with the news media, Jackson compared Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Napoleon and likening the company to a drug-dealing street gang.
Jackson also presided over the 1990 drug trial of Marion Barry, the District of Columbia mayor caught in an FBI sting smoking crack-cocaine in a hotel room. The judge’s original six-month sentence was thrown out after an appeals court said he didn’t adequately explain how he applied federal sentencing guidelines. Jackson re-sentenced him to a six-month term.
