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 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 gather 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." Federal judicial service Eleventh Circuit nomination and confirmation 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 His nomination was withdrawn in January 2003.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. 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." 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