William H. Pryor Jr.

It was reported in mid-December that President Trump had narrowed his choices to "three or four individuals", with the top two leading candidates being Sykes and Pryor. President Trump announced Neil Gorsuch for his pick for the Court on January 31, 2017.

On May 16, 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump released a list of eleven individuals from which he would pick to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by the death of Antonin Scalia, including Pryor.

Pryor has been criticized for his refusal to reopen the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, an Alabama man whose 1985 conviction was vacated in 2015. In 2014, the United States Supreme Court held that Hinton's trial lawyer was "constitutionally deficient" because he failed to research how much money he could obtain for an expert witness. The expert that Hinton's lawyer obtained on the cheap was insufficiently qualified. Hinton was released on April 3, 2015 after the State of Alabama could not regather enough evidence for a retrial. In 2002, Pryor opposed Hinton's attempts to challenge his conviction, stating that Hinton's new experts "did not prove [his] innocence and the state does not doubt his guilt."

In November 2014, Pryor wrote for the en banc circuit when it found, by a vote of 5–4, that an inmate who is no longer classified as a career offender nevertheless cannot seek a sentencing reduction. In Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama (2015), the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, vacated a three-judge district court opinion by Pryor which had rejected the plaintiff's racial gerrymandering claims.

Born in Mobile, Alabama, the son of William Holcombe Pryor and Laura Louise Bowles, Pryor was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. He and his siblings attended McGill–Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Northeast Louisiana University in 1984 (now University of Louisiana, Monroe) and his Juris Doctor from Tulane University Law School in 1987, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Tulane Law Review.

President Barack Obama nominated Pryor to serve as a commissioner on the United States Sentencing Commission on April 15, 2013. Pryor had experience with sentencing issues and reform at the state level.

During his tenure as Attorney General of the State of Alabama, he successfully led the effort to establish, by legislation, the Alabama Sentencing Commission. Pryor has written several law review articles about his experiences with sentencing reform. The Senate unanimously confirmed Pryor by voice vote on June 6, 2013, and he will serve a term that expires on October 31, 2017. On January 3, 2017, Pryor was named the Acting Chair of the Commission. Pryor will continue to serve as an active judge on the Eleventh Circuit during his service on the Commission.

Despite the fact that the 108th United States Congress was controlled by the Republican Party, Senate Democrats refused to allow Pryor to be confirmed, criticizing him as an extremist, citing statements he had made such as referring to the Supreme Court as "nine octogenarian lawyers" and saying that Roe v. Wade was the "worst abomination in the history of constitutional law."

On May 23, 2005, Senator John McCain announced an agreement between seven Republican and seven Democratic U.S. Senators, the Gang of 14, to ensure an up-or-down vote on Pryor and two other stalled Bush nominees, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. On June 9, 2005, Pryor was confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit by a vote of 53–45.

Pryor received his commission on June 10, 2005. On June 20, 2005, he was sworn in at the age of 43. Pryor was the only judge appointed to the Eleventh Circuit by President George W. Bush.

Due to a filibuster of his nomination, President George W. Bush installed Pryor as a circuit court judge on February 20, 2004, using a recess appointment to bypass the regular Senate confirmation process. Pryor resigned as Alabama's attorney general that same day and took his judicial oath for a term lasting until the end of the first session of the 109th Congress (December 22, 2005), when his appointment would have ended had he not been eventually confirmed.

Pryor received national attention in 2003 when he called for the removal of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who had disobeyed a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building. Pryor said that although he agreed with the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, he was bound to follow the court order and uphold the rule of law. Pryor personally prosecuted Moore for violations of the Canons of Judicial Ethics, and the Alabama Court of the Judiciary unanimously removed Moore from office.

Pryor was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit by President George W. Bush on April 9, 2003, to fill a seat vacated by Judge Emmett Ripley Cox, who had assumed senior status. Originally, William H. Steele had been nominated to the seat in 2001, but his nomination had become stalled in the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee during the 107th United States Congress because African-American groups protested his decisions in two civil rights cases as a magistrate judge. His nomination was withdrawn in January 2003. Pryor was nominated as Steele's replacement.

During the confirmation hearing, Pryor was criticized in particular for filing an amicus brief in 2003 on behalf of the State of Alabama in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas that urged the Court to uphold Texas penal code § 21.06, which classifies homosexual sex as a misdemeanor. Pryor wrote in the brief that "this Court has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy," further arguing that the recognition of a constitutional right to sodomy would "logically extend" to activities like "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and pedophilia."

In 1994, Pryor was introduced to Jeff Sessions, who was then campaigning to become the Attorney General of Alabama. Sessions won, and from 1995 to 1997 Pryor served as Alabama's deputy attorney general. When Sessions became a U.S. Senator in 1997, Alabama Governor Fob James made Pryor the state's Attorney General. He was, at that time, the youngest state attorney general in the United States. Pryor was elected in 1998 and reelected in 2002. At reelection, Pryor received nearly 59% of the vote, the highest percentage of any statewide candidate.

Pryor worked as a private attorney from 1988–95, serving as adjunct professor of maritime law at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University from 1989–95. Pryor is currently a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University.

Pryor served as a law clerk to Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1987–88.

William Holcombe Pryor Jr. (born April 26, 1962) is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and a Commissioner of the United States Sentencing Commission. Previously, he was the Attorney General of Alabama, from 1997 to 2004.