THIS IS EMBARRASSING. Ninth Circuit Contender Is Exposed As Pretender.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Ware had long recounted (as this New York Times article put it) the “tragedy that made him ‘hungry for justice’: the murder of his teen-age brother, Virgil, in a racist shooting in Birmingham . . . at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1963.” James was pedaling his bicycle, with 13-year-old Virgil on the handlebars, when two white teenagers shot and killed Virgil, on “the same day that four little black girls were killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church across town.”

In the years since his appointment to the federal bench, Ware had told the story “over and over at judicial conferences and in newspaper interviews” and had “held audiences . . . spellbound with his account.”

Except it turned out that Ware’s story was a fiction. More precisely, the horrific incident that Ware described did occur, but it was a different James Ware who was Virgil’s brother and who was riding the bicycle. Judge Ware was pretending to be that other James Ware.

The man who discovered and exposed Ware’s lie was a federal district judge in Alabama, U. W. Clemon. Judge Clemon, who became Alabama’s first black federal judge in 1980, had often heard Ware tell his story. In early August 1997, he read a Birmingham newspaper article that recounted the murder of Virgil Ware. The article quoted his brother James at length and stated that he continued to live in Birmingham and “has worked for Drummond/ABC Coke for 20 years.” It also included pictures of Virgil Ware’s family.

Ooops. This sort of lie would seem to be bad judicial behavior.