U.S. Executive Magistrate Judge Steven Whalen joined the bench in 2002 after a career working at the State Appellate Defender Office and as a criminal defense attorney.
(Photo courtesy of U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan)
By David Ashenfelter
Steven Whalen thought he had his career path set until the rigors of college chemistry forced him to recalibrate his goals.
Whalen switched majors, got a law degree, became a criminal defense lawyer and eventually become a U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, magistrate judge in Detroit. On June 15, he plans to retire as executive magistrate judge after 18 years on the bench.
“The law turned out to be a perfect career for me in terms of the way I approach things,” Whalen, 73, said in a recent interview about his love of legal research and analysis. “It’s been a great run. I’ve been at it 45 years and loved every bit of it.”
Court employees will be sorry to see him go.
“Judge Whalen will be sorely missed by his colleagues and the staff of our court,” said U.S. District Court Chief Judge Denise Page Hood. “He has led the magistrate judges of the Eastern District of Michigan for 17 years, championed their inclusion into the committee structure of the court, managed caseloads through several retirements and additions to the court’s magistrate judges corps and
has helped to lead the court through the changes required by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“He has been an excellent leader and a friend,” Hood added. “I wish him the best of retirement.”
Robert Steven Whalen was born and raised in an Irish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood in Chicago, the youngest of two sons of an accountant for a natural gas pipeline company. His mother was assistant manager of a furniture store.
He said his parents, especially his father, were his inspirations.
“When my dad was 4 years old, he lost both legs in a terrible train accident – one above the knee and one below the knee – but he didn’t let it ruin his life,” Whalen said. He said his father, who wore prostheses, went on to graduate from high school and college, pursue a career, marry, raise a family and live a productive life.
“As a kid I never thought about dad’s disability,” Whalen said. “He got up every day, walked to the bus stop, and went downtown to work. He was such an optimist and that’s where a lot of my optimism came from… He was a heck of a guy.”
Whalen said his parents were egalitarians, who judged people on their character and believed that people basically were good.
“That informed my career and led me into the kind of law I practiced,” he said.
After graduating from Sullivan Public High School in 1965, Whalen enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as his father had done.
Though young Whalen had done well in high school chemistry, he said college-level chemistry wasn’t as appealing, so he switched his major to political science with a minor in Russian language. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, he spent six months driving a taxicab in Chicago before heading to Ann Arbor to attend graduate school.
Whalen never got around to graduate school. After working nearly three years as a lab assistant at the University of Michigan Hospital, he decided to move to Detroit and enroll at Wayne State University Law School.
During his second year of law studies, he began working 20 hours a week at the Federal Defender Office as a legal researcher and writer for criminal defendants who were appealing their convictions to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
That’s when he got hooked on appellate criminal law.
Whalen graduated from Wayne Law in 1976, passed the bar exam and went to work for the Senior Citizens Legal Aid Project in Detroit because a financial crunch was preventing the Federal Defender Office from hiring staff attorneys.
The next year, he joined the State Appellate Defender Office (SADO), which represents indigent criminal defendants who appeal their convictions.
“It was a great job and a great bunch of lawyers,” Whalen said of his seven years at SADO. He said he researched, wrote and argued appeals at the Michigan Court of Appeals, Michigan Supreme Court and, in one instance, at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court case involved a Detroit woman who was sentenced to mandatory life in prison for her role in a double homicide. The jury convicted her largely on a co-defendant’s confession to police.
Whalen represented her in a lengthy succession of state and federal appeals, arguing that she had been denied her 6th Amendment right to confront her accuser. The justices disagreed in a 6-3 decision but sent the case back for retrial after accepting Whalen’s position that the prosecutor had misused the confession in his closing argument to jurors.
“That case was a 12-year odyssey,” Whalen said, referring to the seemingly endless appeals. He said the woman was freed from prison and was never retried.
Whalen, who figures he argued 700-800 appeals during his years at SADO, left around 1985 to go into private practice so he could handle cases at the front end of the justice system rather than trying to fix them on the back end.
“I just wanted to try cases,” he said.
And that’s what he did for the next 17 years, primarily as a criminal defense attorney in state and federal courts. He represented many defendants as a court-appointed criminal defense attorney on assignment from the Federal Defender Office.
In 2001, he decided to apply for a vacancy for a federal magistrate judge on the U.S. District Court in Detroit. He won out over 50 other applicants and was sworn in September 2002. The next year, district court judges elevated him to executive magistrate judge.
Federal magistrate judges, who currently are paid $201,000 per year and serve eight-year terms, preside over criminal arraignments and detention-bond hearings. They also handle other preliminary criminal matters and preside over discovery and pre-trial civil proceedings at the request of federal district judges. They also may preside over misdemeanor trials and, with the consent of the parties, may handle civil cases from start to finish, including trial and judgment.
As executive magistrate judge, Whalen chairs monthly meetings of the other six magistrate judges, serves as a liaison to the district judges, meets regularly with Judge Hood and supervises the court’s staff lawyers who focus on prisoner habeas petitions and other matters.
“It was a big adjustment,” Whalen said of becoming a magistrate judge because it required learning civil procedure and sitting as a neutral rather than an advocate. He said it took two to three years to acquire a complete comfort level.
Whalen said the most challenging matter he handled over the past 18 years involved a civil lawsuit resulting from the death of Tamara Greene, a stripper known as Strawberry, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003 after supposedly dancing at a never-proven party at the mayoral Manoogian Mansion.
In 2008, then-U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen ordered Whalen and Magistrate Judge Michael Hluchaniuk to review 626,638 text messages retrieved from city-issued pagers during the period surrounding Greene’s death to find out if city officials had sabotaged her murder investigation to prevent the killers from being brought to justice and sued by Greene’s teenage son.
A 19-month painstaking review netted only 36 texts that had any relevance to Greene’s death, none shed any light on the killing or investigation and Rosen dismissed the lawsuit.
“Think about the worst case you could receive and double it,” Whalen said of the ordeal. He praised Hluchaniuk, his law clerk, Amy Humphreys, and the Court Information Technology staff for creating an electronic spreadsheet to put the texts in chronological order.
Whalen has no specific retirement plans.
“I’m going to wait and see what develops,” he said. “I want to spend more time with music, relax and think about what the next chapter will be.”
He has played violin since a child and had performed for many years with The Cat’s Pajamas, a lawyer jazz band, which entertains at legal gatherings. He also has two adult children.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, Whalen said: “As somebody who treated people with respect, who gave you a fair shake no matter who you were of whatever kind of case you had.
“I also would like to be remembered as someone who took his job very seriously but who didn’t take himself that seriously,” he added.
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David Ashenfelter is the public information officer for the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan.
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