T. S. Ellis III

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Thomas Selby Ellis III (May 15, 1940 – July 30, 2025) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia , appointed by Ronald Reagan .

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 Federal judicial service

  • 2.1 Notable cases

    • 2.1.1 John Walker Lindh

    • 2.1.2 Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman

    • 2.1.3 Khalid El-Masri

    • 2.1.4 Paul Manafort

    • 2.1.5 Others

• 3 Personal life and death

• 4 See also

• 5 References

• 6 External links

Background

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Thomas Selby Ellis III was born on May 15, 1940, in Bogotá , Colombia, where his family resided at the time for his father's career as an executive in the oil industry.

Ellis graduated from Princeton University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in 1961. Ellis served in the United States Navy as a Naval aviator from 1961 to 1967. Ellis earned a Juris Doctor magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1969. Harvard awarded Ellis a Knox Fellowship for study in England. He then received a Diploma in Law in 1970 from Magdalen College, Oxford . Ellis then entered private practice with the law firm of Hunton & Williams (now Hunton Andrews Kurth ), based in Virginia , where he remained until 1987. His practice included a wide range of commercial litigation matters. He often worked with fellow Hunton & Williams attorney John Charles Thomas , who became Virginia's first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Ellis also was a lecturer at the College of William and Mary , from 1981 to 1983.

Federal judicial service

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Ellis was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on July 1, 1987, to a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia vacated by Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 5, 1987, and received his commission on August 6, 1987. He took senior status on April 1, 2007.

Notable cases

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John Walker Lindh

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Ellis presided over the plea bargain and sentencing of John Walker Lindh . He imposed a sentence of 20 years for two charges, aiding the Taliban and carrying weapons while committing a felony. He also imposed the Son of Sam law , banning him from profiting from books written about his case.

Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman

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See also: Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal and United States v. Franklin

On January 20, 2006, Ellis sentenced former Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin to 12 years and 7 months in prison and a $10,000 fine for passing national defense information to an Israeli diplomat and AIPAC , a pro-Israel lobby group. In 2009, he altered the sentence to 10 months at a halfway house and community service, but chastised Franklin for not following "the rule of law".[_citation needed
_]

On August 9, 2006, Ellis denied a motion to dismiss the case of two former AIPAC employees. Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were charged under the Espionage Act with illegally receiving and transmitting national defense information. Ellis wrote:

…both common sense and the relevant precedent point persuasively to the conclusion that the government can punish those outside of the government for the unauthorized receipt and deliberate retransmission of information relating to the national defense." (p. 53)

United States v. Rosen was also a pioneering use of the silent witness rule in a courtroom. The rule allows for sensitive (classified, or otherwise) evidence to be hidden from the public, but available to the jury & counsel, by the use of "substitution" of code-words using a "key card," to which witnesses and the jury would refer during the trial, but which the public would not have access to. Most previous attempts by the government to use the rule had been banned by various judges or the case had been settled before trial. Ellis was the first to allow it, although he limited it to 4 minutes of use at trial, and devised a "fairness test" as to whether the rule should be allowed, and to how much it would make the trial "closed." Critics worried about the Fifth Amendment [due pro

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John Walker Lindh

Ellis presided over the plea bargain and sentencing of John Walker Lindh . He imposed a sentence of 20 years for two charges, aiding the Taliban and carrying weapons while committing a felony. He also imposed the Son of Sam law , banning him from profiting from books written about his case.

Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman

See also: Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal and United States v. Franklin

On January 20, 2006, Ellis sentenced former Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin to 12 years and 7 months in prison and a $10,000 fine for passing national defense information to an Israeli diplomat and AIPAC , a pro-Israel lobby group. In 2009, he altered the sentence to 10 months at a halfway house and community service, but chastised Franklin for not following "the rule of law".[_citation needed
_]

On August 9, 2006, Ellis denied a motion to dismiss the case of two former AIPAC employees. Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were charged under the Espionage Act with illegally receiving and transmitting national defense information. …