Edward B. Thomas
American judge
Edward Beers Thomas (August 4, 1848 – March 27, 1929) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Education and career
Born on August 4, 1848, in Cortland, New York, Thomas received an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1870 from Yale University. He entered private practice in New York. He was a member of the New York State Senate from 1881 to 1885. He was elected from New York's 24th Senate District, sitting in the 105th, 106th, 107th and 108th New York State Legislatures. At the New York state election, 1885, he ran on the Republican ticket for New York Attorney General but was defeated by the incumbent Democrat Denis O'Brien.
Federal judge
Thomas was nominated by President William McKinley on February 7, 1898, to a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York vacated by Judge Asa Wentworth Tenney. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 15, 1898, and received his commission the same day.
In the federal trial of Ida Craddock for violating the Comstock Act due to her mailing a marriage pamphlet, Judge Thomas denied Craddock's defense the request to permit the jury to read the pamphlet. He declared it was "obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty" and told the jury that the question was whether or not the defendant mailed the pamphlet to which she was found guilty.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward B. Thomas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.