Northern Cal judge James Ware, who presided over gay marriage and torture cases, to retire in August

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San Francisco Chronicle reports:

James Ware, appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, became chief judge of the Northern District of California in January 2011 when Vaughn Walker stepped down. The office, which includes administrative duties and a reduced caseload, has a seven-year term, but Ware said Tuesday he had been planning to leave after turning 65 in November.

Ware spent most of his career in San Jose and issued one of his most important rulings there. It came in a suit by five men who accused a local flight-planning company of helping the CIA transport captives to overseas prisons for brutal interrogations, a program known as extraordinary rendition.

Ware dismissed the suit in 2008, saying courts could not decide such matters because of the risk of exposing state secrets. The ruling, defended by both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations, was briefly overturned on appeal but later reinstated in a 6-5 decision of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

More recently, Ware took over the case of Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage in California that Walker declared unconstitutional in 2010. Ware rejected arguments by Prop. 8's sponsors that the ruling should be set aside because Walker had not disclosed that he was a gay man with a longtime partner.

Clinton nominated Ware to the Ninth Circuit in 1997, but the judge withdrew his candidacy after admitting that a story he had told publicly for years, about being the brother of a youth who was shot to death by white racists in Alabama, was false.