Juan R. Torruella

Torruella was nominated by President Gerald Ford on November 18, 1974, to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico vacated by Judge Hiram Rafael Cancio. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 18, 1974, and received his commission two days later. He served as chief judge from 1982 to 1984. His service was terminated on October 30, 1984, due to his elevation to the First Circuit.[3]

In 1979, Torruella was the judge in various criminal trespass cases against demonstrators who entered a beach in Vieques to protest its use by the U.S. Navy. Torruella ordered that the demonstrators receive separate trials. Some defendants were sentenced to prison; others received six-month suspended sentences. Some of the demonstrators were radical pro-independence advocates and refused to acknowledge the federal court's jurisdiction or to defend themselves at trial.[6][7] The Vieques cases were the highest-profile of Torruella's cases over his decade as a district judge.[4]

Torruella was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on August 1, 1984, to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to a new seat created by 98 Stat. 333.[3] He was confirmed by the Senate on October 3, 1984,[3][8] by voice vote.[8] He received his commission the following day,[3] becoming the first Puerto Rican to serve on the circuit court bench.[4] José A. Fusté replaced Torruella on the district bench.[9]

Torruella served as chief judge of the First Circuit from 1994 to 2001.[3][1] Although his length of service entitled him to take senior status, Torruella chose to remain a judge on active service[10] and continued to hear cases until his death in 2020.[1]

Torruella was consistently an advocate of Puerto Rican rights.[1] He dissented from a 2005 ruling en banc First Circuit decision that Puerto Ricans are properly denied a voice in the election of the president of the United States because Puerto Rico is not a state.[11] In August 2017, Torruella wrote a lengthy dissent when the en banc circuit rejected a lawsuit challenging Puerto Rico's exclusion from congressional apportionment.[12][13] Torruella wrote the book The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (University of Puerto Rico: 1988), a study of the Supreme Court's decisions in the Insular Cases, in which Torruella argues that "colonial rule and the indignities of second-class citizenship can be ended not, as in the case of the Philippines, by granting the colony its independence ... but rather, by securing for Puerto Rico equality under American law" including Puerto Rican statehood.[14] The book was favorably reviewed by Judge José A. Cabranes in the Harvard Law Review.[14] In a 2018 article, Torruella argued that "Puerto Rico's colonial relationship to the United States throughout the United States' various 'experiments' with Puerto Rico and its people, although variously labeled for political purposes and constitutionally denominated an 'unincorporated territory,' has merely perpetuated the inherent inequality of the United States citizens who reside in Puerto Rico as compared to the rest of the nation, and is the major cause of the Island's economic crisis."[15]

Torruella authored the First Circuit opinion in Planned Parenthood of Northern New England v. Heed (2004), in which the court upheld the district court's decision declaring New Hampshire's "parental notification" abortion law unconstitutional, and enjoining its enforcement. The decision held that the state law was inconsistent with the Constitution and relevant Supreme Court constitutional decisions in Roe v. Wade, Stenberg v. Carhart, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.[16] The case later went to the Supreme Court in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (2006).[17]

In 2009, Torruella wrote the opinion in Noonan v. Staples, Inc., allowing a suit for libel to proceed because even though the statements at issue were true they reflected "actual malice." (Under the law in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the U.S., truth is usually an absolute defense to libel, but Massachusetts law contains an exception if the defendant made the statement with "actual malice.")[18][19] Torruella's decision did not decide the question of whether this exception was inconsistent with the Constitution's First Amendment because the argument was raised too late in the proceedings.[18][19] A Harvard Law Review comment indicated that "the court's analysis serves as an indication that, had the constitutional claim been appropriately asserted, the law would not have survived."[18]

In 2012, Torruella joined a unanimous First Circuit panel decision (written by Judge Michael Boudin) in Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services. The decision struck down section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied federal benefits to all same-sex couples, even those legally married under state law.[20][21]

In 2015, Torruella dissented from a First Circuit decision denying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's request for a writ of mandamus compelling the district court to grant a change of venue of Tsarnaev's trial due to widespread pretrial publicity.[22] In July 2020, Torruella joined the opinion of Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson in vacating the federal death sentence of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, on the basis of legal errors in the sentencing proceedings. The First Circuit remanded to the district court for a new penalty phase. In a concurring opinion, Torruella wrote that he would have gone further to hold that the district court's denials of Tsarnaev's motions for change of venue were an abuse of discretion that "denied Tsarnaev the right to a fair trial and sentencing determination," given the huge media coverage of the bombing in the Boston area. Torruella cited the precedent in the trial of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a change of venue to Denver was granted.[23][24][25]