Federal Judge Unflinching in the Public Spotlight
She was born outside the U.S. Her grandparents had been slaves. Inspired by her parents’ work ethic and seasoned by her own life experiences, any lawyer or litigant appearing in her courtroom who thinks they could intimidate or persuade this judge by use of anything other than believable facts which are consistent with legal duties, will be sadly mistaken.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Tanya S. Chutkan (TC) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the oldest of three children.
Her paternal grandparents were indentured servants brought from India by British planters to toil on Jamaican sugar estates. Her father was born on a plantation and eventually received an academic scholarship, awarded annually to (only) one young plantation worker. “I wore shoes and experienced indoor plumbing for the first time in my life after enrolling in my scholarship school,” said TC’s father. He worked diligently in all his school courses and is now an orthopedic surgeon.
TC’s maternal grandfather was a newspaper reporter and radio host who once spent four months in prison for agitating against repressive conditions in colonial Jamaica. Her mother was an English instructor and dancer who became director of the National Dance Theater Company in Jamaica. In her 50s, she earned a law degree from Emory University in Atlanta and subsequently practiced law, first in Jamaica and then in Washington, D.C.
“Seeing how her mother lived her life, Tanya would grow up believing that you can do it all,” said a childhood friend of TC, now a lawyer in Kingston.
CHILDHOOD
Despite her family’s long line of excellent role models, TC did not seem fated to take the world by storm. Friends recall her as a B student who whiled away her days reading novels and playing the Jamaican card game Kalooki.
In her senior class yearbook in Kingston, TC offered a self-effacing description: “Ambition: to become a famous dancer. Destiny: permanent usher of the National Dance Theatre Company.”
EDUCATION
An advertisement for George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. drew TC to the nation’s capital, where for the first time in her life, TC was outside the Caribbean, attending classes on a campus whose students were overwhelmingly White. A friend from Jamaica followed TC to GWU, recalling being asked by a classmate if Jamaicans lived in trees. The two expatriate students worked together serving food in the campus cafeteria.
FIRST JOBS ARE NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
TC majored in economics in college, but friends say that she found it dull. After graduating from GWU, she relocated to New York City in hopes of pursuing dance as a profession, but a few months with the Dance Theater of Harlem appeared to have rid her of any such ambition.
She then spent four months in 1984 volunteering for the (losing) campaign of presidential candidate Walter Mondale, an experience that awakened her interest in government and law.
EDUCATION CONTINUES
After enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and graduating in the usual three years later, TC joined a Washington based law firm that specialized in civil litigation. Her cases involved – uninspiring to her – railroad trackage rights, prompting her to apply four years later for a job as a public defender in Washington. Her clients were now indigent defendants accused of drug dealing and violent felonies, but friends say the work ignited her passion to defend the Constitutional rights of people.
After several years serving as a public defender, TC was appointed lead attorney for sex offenses and eventually for the most serious crimes: homicides.
CHALLENGE – BALANCING FAMILY LIFE
Following TC’s marriage and the birth of her two children, then a divorce, the demands of parenting and long, intense criminal trials had become difficult for TC to continue her responsibilities as both a zealous attorney and nurturing mother, so she returned to civil work in a private law firm.
ONE PATH TO BECOMING A FEDERAL JUDGE
While appearing to the outside world as a mother happy to be able to spend more time with her children and concurrently working a less demanding schedule as a lawyer, TC’s aunt recalls that TC “was bored by it all.”
Friends within the legal community encouraged TC to apply for a vacant seat on the U.S. District Court in Washington. TC was not a ‘power-alley regular’ despite contributing a total of $3,273 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and volunteering for his re-election effort. She nonetheless filled out the application, was eventually nominated within the political process and confirmed as a federal judge by the U.S. Senate, 95-0.
“I’ve never been so excited to receive a pay cut,” said TC to her sister.
FAIR AND TOUGH RULINGS
Judge Chutkan came to her new job as a federal judge with a wealth of experience in trials, both jury and non-jury. Her ability to assess witnesses and apply the rules of evidence, in addition to extensive preparation before hearings, helped distinguish her from the start, other judges have said. (The judge herself declined to speak to the reporter who wrote the news article upon which this career story has been based.)
Judge Chutkan has already dealt with several high-profile cases.
In 2017, she presided over the case of a 17-year-old undocumented woman from Central America who discovered she was pregnant after she was detained at the Texas border but was denied the abortion she requested by the Trump administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
That same year, an American suspected of being an enemy combatant was captured by Syrian forces in Iraq and handed over to the U.S. Defense Department, which detained him for months without releasing his identity or giving him access to legal counsel.
In both cases, Judge Chutkan bristled against the government prosecutors, pronouncing herself “astounded” and “frankly amazed” by their legal arguments. She ruled that the woman could have an abortion and that the detainee was permitted to retain an attorney.
Two years later, at the sentencing hearing of Maria Butina, Russian firearms advocate who had failed to register as a foreign agent while collecting information from American conservative activists, Judge Chutkan’s ruling favored the government. Though Ms. Butina had pleaded guilty and had cooperated extensively with the F.B.I., the judge still ordered her to serve an additional nine months in prison.
Judge Chutkan observed, publicly, that the defendant’s information gathering had taken place “at a time when the Russian government was acting to interfere and affect the United States’ political and electoral process.” While some legal observers stated that the judge’s comments about Russian election interference were unnecessarily outside the bounds of the facts involved in the defendant’s guilty plea because Ms. Butina had not been accused of directly conspiring with Russia to meddle in the 2016 American election, the judge’s sentiment is consistent with what her allies describe as TC’s commitment, given Jamaica’s history of political violence and unrest, to protect America’s democratic institutions.
Later, Judge Chutkan ruled against former President Trump’s assertion of ‘executive privilege’ in his refusal to hand over documents to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee Investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Her language was direct: “Presidents are not kings and plaintiff is not president.”
COURAGE UNDER PRESSURE
A fellow Federal judge recalled the day in 2019 when then President Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, announced that the federal government would resume executions of death row inmates after a nearly two-decade hiatus. Judge Chutkan agreed to have all the cases transferred to her jurisdiction.
Over the next sixteen months, she blocked what would have been the swift executions of 13 people, instead permitting them to appeal the constitutionality of potentially inhumane lethal injections. As a result, several of the prisoners’ cases remain under judicial review.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – PRESIDING OVER FORMER PRESIDENT’S CRIMINAL TRIAL
Now that Judge Chutkan has been randomly selected to preside over the federal criminal trial of former president Trump (scheduled for March 4, 2024, as this story is being written), a judicial colleague pointed out the difference between the matters involving the death row inmates and the crimes charged against the former president. TC’s fellow judge noted that the stakes of the inmates’ cases were literally matters of life and death. “You think the Trump case is more pressure than that?”
There is no doubt that the former president and his defense team are well aware of Judge Chutkan’s decisions involving the several ‘January 6’ defendants who have been tried in her courtroom. In numerous cases, she has brushed aside the government’s recommendation of probation or home detention and has instead ordered jail time for those who entered the Capitol that day.
“There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” she declared while issuing a 45-day prison sentence to a defendant in October 2021.
“For someone who is not very sentimental, my sister is surprisingly patriotic,” said Judge Chutkan’s sister. “We come from a country that has a more precarious relationship with democracy than America. It gives her a reverence for democratic institutions, whether it’s the orderly transfer of power or everyone deserving a fair defense.”
CHALLENGE – DEATH THREATS
Mr. Trump has already attacked Judge Chutkan as “VERY BIASED AND UNFAIR!” on social media. His attorneys have argued that she should recuse herself because they believe her statements in other cases related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol show a bias against their client. Prosecutors in turn have asked the judge to place a limited gag order on the former president, citing his “near-daily” social media attacks on people involved in the case.
Judge Chutkan has declined to recuse herself but has issued a limited gag order to attempt to avoid violence or threats of violence against those involved in the prosecution of the federal trial over which she will be presiding. Her recent gag order ruling has been appealed by the defense.
So far, Judge Chutkan has treated the former president like any other criminal defendant and has indicated to colleagues that she will approach the trial as she would any criminal proceeding. Even in the midst of a history-making case against a former president, she continues to take on more routine cases and has not requested a reduction in the cases assigned to her courtroom.
But there are differences. Because of threats to her life from Trump supporters, Judge Chutkan no longer rides the five miles by bicycle from her house to the federal courthouse in Washington. Instead, she jogs with U.S. marshals on different routes, and then they drive her to work.
On a recent morning (before this news article appeared in the NY Times), Judge Chutkan entered the courthouse smiling broadly in her running shorts and tennis shoes, flanked by federal marshals and toting a water bottle. When someone in the hallway said that she made for an exuberant sight among all the dark-suited attorneys, the judge chortled, “Perhaps irrational exuberance,” and continued her swift pace to her chambers.
“One trait of my sister that makes her good at her job is that she’s not terribly concerned with other people’s opinions of her,” said her younger sister, a gastroenterologist and author.
CAREER SATISFACTION
Like virtually all other judges, state and federal, little is known about them individually until they are randomly assigned to high profile cases. So it was for Judge Chutkan until she was assigned the first criminal trial – ever- of a former president involving charges of crimes related to interfering with a national presidential election.
Little was known by the general public about Judge Chutkan’s commanding presence in the courtroom, a reflection of her extensive trial experience and an upbringing in a prominent Jamaican family. Unfamiliar in the spotlight though she may be, Judge Chutkan has shown little sign of being intimidated by it.
A Washington defense lawyer, Heather Shaner, who has argued cases before Judge Chutkan, said of her, “What stands out, besides her intelligence and fairness, is that she’s very cognizant of the fact that defendants aren’t lawyers – she’s always very clear in her rulings.”
This career story is based on several sources, including a news article written by Robert Draper, published by The New York Times on October 16,2023 plus internet research.
