Edward Lodge

He served a term as chief judge for the District of Idaho from 1992 to 1999, and was succeeded as chief judge by B. Lynn Winmill. Lodge assumed senior status on July 3, 2015.

In 2004, Lodge presided over the trial of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen—accused of recruiting Islamic fanatics into participating in Jihad against the United States. On May 13, he ruled to disallow a defense witness to refer to a blood drive that Hussayen had run after September 11th to help the victims, nor that he had widely condemned the attacks.

Five years later in 1998, Lodge was also the presiding judge in the case of Idaho v. Lon T. Horiuchi, which involved the indictment of the FBI sniper who shot three people at Ruby Ridge, killing one. Lodge cited the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and dismissed the charges against Horiuchi, which angered many who felt the leniency was unmerited. It was narrowly overturned on appeal (6–5) by the Ninth Circuit in 2001, but the Boundary County prosecutor opted not to pursue the charges brought by his predecessor in 1997.

Lodge was the target of a foiled murder plot in 1998. He is married to Patti Anne Lodge, a state senator from Huston in Canyon County.

In the spring of 1993, Lodge was the presiding judge in the trial of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, defendants in the previous August's Ruby Ridge standoff in northern Idaho.

When Judge Marion Callister of the U.S. District Court in Boise took senior status in 1989, Lodge was recommended by Senator Jim McClure to fill the seat. President George H. W. Bush nominated Lodge on October 30, 1989; he was confirmed with unanimous consent from the Senate on November 21 and received his commission on November 27.

Lodge served for nearly a quarter century as a district judge for the state's Third District in Canyon County, and presided at the double-murder trial of mountainman Claude Dallas in 1982, a case which received national notoriety. He was later appointed as a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Idaho from 1988 to 1989.

Following law school, Lodge practiced law in Idaho from 1962 to 1963. He began his long judicial career in 1963 as a Probate Judge in Canyon County, and in 1965 became the youngest ever appointed to a district court in Idaho, at age 31.

Lodge earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Idaho in Caldwell in 1957, and graduated from the University of Idaho's College of Law in Moscow with a Bachelor of Laws in 1961.

Born in Caldwell, Idaho, Lodge graduated from Caldwell High School and briefly attended the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He was a two-time junior college All-American quarterback at Boise Junior College in 1953 and 1954.

Edward James Lodge (born December 3, 1933) is an inactive Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Idaho in Boise, Idaho.