As a boy growing up in Depression-era Denver, John Kane learned to identify with those on the fringes of society, the powerless, those who were forced to sit in the balcony at movie theaters. He also learned to challenge authority — a skill he embraces with gusto as a federal judge.
In 1979, when Colorado legislators complained about the millions of dollars his court orders would cost the state, he told them to melt the gold in the Capitol’s dome to fund statewide prison improvements.
In 2011, he ordered Denver to turn over 105,000 pages of documents — eight years’ worth of internal affairs records — in a case about the use of excessive force by police.
And more recently in an abuse case filed against the city by a former Denver jail inmate, Kane halted a Denver police internal affairs probe, urged federal authorities to investigate police and jail practices and hauled a prisoner into court for a highly unusual open deposition over the objections of city attorneys. The city recently settled the case by agreeing to pay former inmate Jamal Hunter $3.25 million.
Some in the Denver city attorney’s office portray Kane as “very unfriendly to the city,” but other lawyers familiar with his lengthy judicial career hold him up as a champion of civil rights.
“I think he deserves a lot of credit in the Denver jail case,” said Mike Bender, former state Supreme Court chief justice. “He is very unique. I don’t think you’ll find very many judges holding depositions in their courtroom or asking the federal government to conduct a criminal investigation against a defendant. He is 100 percent dedicated to do what he thinks is right.”
Kane has penned precedent-setting decisions in a gleaming literary style that have helped shape law not only in Colorado but across the nation, said Bender, a lifelong friend of Kane’s.
Kane, a father of four and grandfather of 11, often offers grandfatherly advice about life’s tough lessons to criminal defendants, but he also can fire off blunt, insulting criticism when inspired to do so. He recently scolded a felon with a habit of stealing mail — once at knifepoint — from the Postal Service by lecturing the man about the almost-sacred mission of the nation’s first postal inspector, Benjamin Franklin, and telling the offender how “stupid” he was for repeatedly targeting the well-protected federal department.
Kane’s 37 years of service haven’t curbed his penchant for taking extraordinary, impactful action. And the snowy-haired, 77-year-old senior judge is healthy and isn’t planning to leave the bench anytime soon.
“I made a lifetime commitment, and I fully intend to meet it,” Kane said.
Kane met two Denver Post journalists for an interview last week in his Italian Renaissance-style home decorated with tapestries, oil paintings, lithographs, metallic statuettes, wood carvings and porcelain sculptures from Ireland, Albania, India, Turkey and nations crisscrossing the Far East.
On the walls of the judge’s home office are two telling and treasured possessions: There’s the framed “Coat of Arms” document portraying his Irish familial roots.
There’s also the small oil portrait of a black woman in profile, a birthday gift from his third wife, Stephanie, 62. The expression on the woman’s face in the painting captures an emotional strength and determination that the judge so admires.
“That speaks to me more than any other painting. … I have an affinity for African-Americans,” he said.
Kane’s Colorado roots date back to the Gold Rush in the 1850s. His great-granduncle was Jim “Leadville Fireman” Hanley, a bare-knuckle boxer who toured the country fighting champion John Sullivan. His father, a former Colorado legislator and pharmacist, was named John after Sullivan and Judge Kane inherited the same name from his dad.
Kane started working at age 9, and he’s always had at least one job in the 68 years that have followed. He’s been a paperboy for The Denver Post and a golf caddy. He has set pins in bowling alleys, delivered pills to patients for pharmacies, cleaned up dog runs for a veterinarian and was a Safeway sacker.
He readily acknowledged that his political leanings were largely established in his youth, saying that “any judge who says he is unbiased is delusional.”
Kane said he avoids making a biased decision based on his own prejudices by acknowledging them and making sure they don’t sway him.
“I put my biases on a conscious level, and I make sure that the decision I make excludes bias,” he said.
Kane, nicknamed “Buddy,” was a gifted student in an era when kids who knew more than their teachers ended up in the hallway or staying after school writing on the blackboard as punishment.
“I stirred the mix,” Kane said, recalling that he once told a nun at his Catholic grade school that “the Trinity doesn’t make any sense to me.” He was punished another time at South High School by a history teacher after Kane corrected him for mistakenly telling the class that the Mexican war followed the Civil War.
“If you know so much why don’t you teach?” the teacher told the smart-aleck student. Kane eagerly answered, “OK.”
If he grew up today, he said he likely would have been “stoked” with Ritalin, but instead he was shunted off into special classes meant for kids with discipline problems. When his father joined the Navy in 1942 and remained away from home the next three years, his mother worked as a bookkeeper. Instead of earning raises for stellar work, she received one-time bonuses from her bosses while the men got raises.
Feeling somewhat ostracized in school and in the community in his father’s absence, Kane felt like an outsider. He identified with people who were society’s outsiders.
“My sympathies went with people who were marginalized,” Kane said, recalling how blacks largely were segregated in his boyhood.
“They are not the type of people you are going to play squash with at the country club,” he said about the sentiment at the time.
“There is an incipient resentment that there are people that are not able to compete,” Kane said. “Race plays a big part of that.”
Whenever Kane could, he skipped class at the University of Denver’s law school to attend court appearances by a man who became a mentor, Irving Andrews, a civil rights attorney who was a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“He was the most articulate lawyer I ever met,” Kane said.
Kane eventually joined Andrews’ law firm. Together they defended protesters during the early 1960s civil rights movement. In 1964, Kane became Colorado’s first public defender and for the next two years, handled hundreds of criminal defenses for mostly poor people and minorities.
President Jimmy Carter nominated Kane to the federal bench in 1977.
Early in Kane’s judicial career, a Colorado prisoner sued the state claiming that his cramped prison cell — 60 square feet — violated his constitutional rights. When Kane refused to dismiss the case and demanded that the state abide a federal standard of holding inmates in cells that were at least 72-square feet, it set off a maelstrom of outrage by legislators who claimed it would bankrupt the state.
Kane was not swayed by popular opinion. His decision withstood appeals and in more than 30 years since then has been cited as a standard of law throughout the country. What irks the judge more than anything is encountering leaders who abuse their authority, he said.
“People who are subject to the whims and caprice of other people,” Kane said, while petting a purring, black cat in his lap.
“Thank God for Judge Kane,” said Boulder attorney Timothy Rastello, who has won multimillion-dollar civil rights cases against Denver. “Throughout his career he has been willing to take on the powers that be. The man has as much integrity as any man you’ll ever meet. One thing that rankles him more than anything is the abuse of power.”
On a bookcase covering the back wall of Kane’s home office are hardbound books containing a career’s worth of the judge’s federal court decisions and opinions. The books stretch 3 feet across a shelf.
“He’s aged, but he’s the same lovable, intelligent, witty man that tells off-color jokes. I think he is a great treasure for Colorado,” Bender said.
Trying to achieve justice is always Kane’s goal.
“It doesn’t mean revenge, retribution or compensation,” he said. “What it means, and has been since ancient Greece, is putting things in balance. That’s what justice is.”
U.S. District Judge John L. Kane
1937: Born in Tucumcari, N.M.
1958: Bachelor’s degree from University of Colorado
1960: Law degree from University of Denver’s College of Law
1961-64 and 1970-77: Private law practice
1961-63: Deputy district attorney
1965-67: Colorado’s first public defender
1977: Nominated to federal bench
1967-68: Deputy director, Peace Corps, Calcutta, India
1968-69: Country representative, Peace Corps, Turkey
1973-74: Instructor, Metropolitan State College, Denver
1978-88, 1990-96: Faculty, University of Denver College of Law
1978-88: Adjunct professor
1990-96: Miller distinguished visiting professor of law
1989: Visiting lecturer in law, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
1996-2002: Adjunct professor, DU law school
Among U.S. District Judge John Kane’s most notable cases:
• In 1979, in Ramos v. Lamm, Kane ordered Colorado to make far-reaching changes in its prison system or shut it down.
• In 2003, Kane ordered the release of an immigrant after he had been held without charges for 99 days in the Aurora Wackenhut detention facility. He then chastised the Immigration and Naturalization Service for denying immigrants due process.
• In 2008, Kane angrily ordered Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman to stop purging names from the state’s voter-registration polls and to restore the names of 146 voters on the rolls.
• In 2008, Kane awarded $926 million to 15,000 property owners living downwind of Rocky Flats. The case was later overturned on appeal.
The Denver Post
