Clarence Addison Brimmer Jr.

Brimmer was born in Rawlins in Carbon County in southern Wyoming, to the attorney Clarence A. Brimmer Sr. and the former Geraldine Zingsheim. Brimmer received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at which he was the editor of the university's The Michigan Daily. In 1944 Brimmer joined the United States Army Air Forces, in which he attained the rank of sergeant and served until 1946. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 1947. Brimmer joined his father's law firm, Brimmer & Brimmer, through which he gained experience as a trial attorney. He was in private practice in Rawlins from 1947 to 1971. He was the state chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party from 1967 to 1971, when he was appointed by Governor Stanley K. Hathaway as the state attorney general, a post he filled until 1974.[1] Brimmer was a Republican candidate in the 1974 Wyoming gubernatorial primary. He polled nearly a quarter of the Republican vote, a strong fourth-place finish, but he lost the nomination to trucking executive Dick Jones of Cody, who in turn was defeated in the general election by a Democrat, Edgar Herschler. Another candidate in the gubernatorial primary was Malcolm Wallop of Sheridan, who in 1976 won one of the United States Senate seats from Wyoming.[2] Brimmer was in private practice in Rawlins once again in 1974, while he also ran for governor, and was briefly the United States Attorney for the District of Wyoming in 1975.

On July 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford nominated Brimmer to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming vacated by Judge Ewing Thomas Kerr. Brimmer was confirmed by the United States Senate on September 15, 1975, and received his commission the following day. He served as Chief Judge from 1986 to 1992 and assumed senior status on September 27, 2006. He was succeeded by Judge Nancy D. Freudenthal, the wife of Democratic former Governor Dave Freudenthal. He took inactive senior status in June 2013, but remained a federal judge until his death.[3]

In 2008 Brimmer ordered a new trial for James Harlow, a Wyoming State Penitentiary inmate who had been on death row after conviction of murdering a prison officer in 1997. Brimmer said that Harlow had been denied a fair trial in the state court because his public defender had been made to fear he would be dismissed for representing Harlow and for seeking more state revenues for the public defenders office.[3]

Brimmer's son Philip A. Brimmer became a federal judge in Colorado in 2008, an appointee of President George W. Bush.[4] Clarence Brimmer died at the age of 92 in Boulder, Colorado.[1]

• Clarence Addison Brimmer Jr. at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Judges of the United States