HONORABLE DAVID BRYAN SENTELLE Oral History Project The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit Oral History Project United States Courts The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit District of Columbia Circuit HONORABLE DAVID BRYAN SENTELLE Interviews conducted by David C. Frederick, Esquire July 7 and 8 and August 12 and 13, 2003 November 6, 2003, January 16, 2004, August 7, 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface. ................................................................................................................................ i Oral History Agreements Honorable David Sentelle ......................................................................................... iii Ann Allen, Esquire......................................................................................................v Oral History Transcripts of Interviews July 7, 2003 .................................................................................................................1 July 8, 2003 ...............................................................................................................67 August 12, 2003 ......................................................................................................130 August 13, 2003 ......................................................................................................178 November 6, 2003 ...................................................................................................226 January 16, 2004 .....................................................................................................281 August 7, 2014 ........................................................................................................325 Index ............................................................................................................................. A-1 Table of Cases and Statutes .............................................................................................B-1 Biographical Sketches Honorable David Sentelle ....................................................................................C-1 David C. Frederick, Esquire .................................................................................C-2 NOTE The following pages record interviews conducted on the dates indicated. The interviews were recorded digitally or on cassette tape, and the interviewee and the interviewer have been afforded an opportunity to review and edit the transcript. The contents hereof and all literary rights pertaining hereto are governed by, and are subject to, the Oral History Agreements included herewith. © 2018 Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. All rights reserved. PREFACE The goal of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is to preserve the recollections of the judges of the Courts of the District of Columbia Circuit and lawyers, court staff, and others who played important roles in the history of the Circuit. The Project began in 1991. Oral history interviews are conducted by volunteer attorneys who are trained by the Society. Before donating the oral history to the Society, both the subject of the history and the interviewer have had an opportunity to review and edit the transcripts. Indexed transcripts of the oral histories and related documents are available in the Judges’ Library in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, 333 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the library of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia With the permission of the person being interviewed, oral histories are also available on the Internet through the Society's Web site, www.dcchs.org. Audio recordings of most interviews, as well as electronic versions of the transcripts, are in the custody of the Society. i THE HONORABLE DAVID B. SENTELLE First Interview July 7, 2003 This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is the Honorable David B. Sentelle, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is David Frederick. The interview took place on July 7, 2003. This is the first interview. MR. FREDERICK: This is David Frederick here to do the oral history of Judge David Sentelle. I’m with the Judge in Chambers. It is July 7, 2003, at about 10:20 in the morning. Good morning, Judge. JUDGE SENTELLE: Good morning, David. MR. FREDERICK: Thank you for doing your oral history for the D.C. Circuit Historical Society. Why don’t we begin by you telling us your full name and your date of birth? JUDGE SENTELLE: David Bryan Sentelle, February 12, 1943. MR. FREDERICK: Where were you born? JUDGE SENTELLE: Canton, North Carolina. MR. FREDERICK: Now I think I read that you were not born in hospital? JUDGE SENTELLE: That’s correct. I run into people occasionally who tell me I couldn’t have been born in Canton because there is no hospital there. I tell them that I was neither sick nor in need of an operation and, therefore, it’s not necessary that you get to a hospital. It’s only necessary that you be near your mother at the time and she didn’t go to the hospital so I didn’t either. MR. FREDERICK: Was it common for children of that era to be born at home? 1 JUDGE SENTELLE: It was transitional, really, in that part of the country. My brother, who is older than me, was actually born in a hospital. But during World War II, gas was hard to come by and they didn’t – it was easier for folks to let one doctor spend his increased allotment of gas than it was for a family to use that gas going to the hospital, so the doctors went where the mamas were and I was born in Canton and there is no hospital in Canton. I was born in Canton. MR. FREDERICK: How much older is your brother than you? JUDGE SENTELLE: Two-and-a-half years and there’s just the two of us. He was 63 on July 5th – last Saturday. MR. FREDERICK: Now tell me about your parents. JUDGE SENTELLE: My father was Horace Sentelle, Jr. He was known to most of his friends – to most everybody – as Dugan. Dugan was a character from a comic strip, Maggie and Jiggs Bringing Up Father. Dugan hung out in the pool hall all the time and apparently my father, in his younger days, had stayed in the pool hall all the time and picked up the nickname of Dugan. He rather liked it. He was sort of an eccentric who taught us to call him Dugan, so my brother and I always called him Dugan and said we were Dugan’s boys. He finished the eleventh grade, which was what was available to him in Clyde, North Carolina, at the time. Clyde is a little further west than Canton. Canton is west of Asheville. Clyde is west of Canton. He bummed around for a while and finally wound up working at a rayon – later nylon – mill outside of Asheville where he was the foreman and a 2 pretty well respected supervisor for someone who didn’t get any farther in school than he did. In fact, I think he and his brother had the two best jobs in the mill of anyone who hadn’t gone to the twelfth grade at least. My mother was Maude Ray. She didn’t have a middle name. She was born in Yancey County, North Carolina. My father is from Haywood, which was west of us, and Yancey is to the east. She grew up in Haywood County. She finished high school in Canton, North Carolina, went to business school in Greensboro for a year or so, was a legal secretary. She was working for Sam Robinson who was a lawyer in Canton who married my father’s sister. I think he was the only one of the brothers or brothers- in-law or sisters that had a college degree and he was a lawyer with a Wake Forest law degree. Mother was working for Sam and the story goes – and I think it’s probably not entirely accurate – but the story goes that my father’s younger brother was getting married in his sister’s home. Most people had house weddings instead of church weddings in the working class in those days. It was at Christmastime and my father was standing under the mistletoe and somebody said, “Dugan, you’d better get out from under there. You’re going to get kissed.” He said, “Nobody would want to kiss me.” Sam’s secretary went over and kissed him. That was my mother and that’s where the whole thing started according to the legend. My mother says they knew each other before that, but at least it became public that they were well-acquainted with one another. 3 MR. FREDERICK: How did the Sentelle family come to settle in North Carolina? JUDGE SENTELLE: We wondered about that, too, David. A theory had been – which proved to be wrong – that it was an Italian-Swiss family and that they had come in with some grape growers who had come in at New Bern in the early part of the pre-Colonial era. In fact we now have – by the tracings of my distant cousin, Sam Sentelle, who is Superintendent of schools of Putnam County, West Virginia – Sam traced it back to the early 18th Century Virginia Colony. The Sentelles were the Huguenots. The first couple. Sam also – Sam and Jane, which is my wife’s name – were Huguenots who were among the few Huguenots who came into the Virginia Colony. Most of the Huguenots came to Charleston. For some reason, my people were always mavericks, I guess. They came to Virginia, drifted west, and then came down the Appalachians over the course of three or four generations. Before the Civil War, the Sentelles were already in the Appalachian Mountains, having gone west in Virginia and then drifted South