(CMR) Jamaican-born American Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan is set to preside over the latest case against former United States President Donald Trump, who was indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
According to the US District Court, Chutkan was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She received a B.A. in Economics from George Washington University and her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was an Associate Editor of the Law Review and a Legal Writing Fellow. She was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in June 2014.
Chutkan worked in private practice with two Washington firms and serving 11 years with the D.C. Public Defender Service. She then joined the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, where as partner she was a white-collar defense specialist focusing on complex antitrust class-action cases.
According to the Washington Post, Chutkan has been the toughest sentencing judge on the D.C. federal court for defendants in the January 6 Capitol attack. Through mid-June, Chutkan sentenced every one of the 31 defendants to have come before her to at least some jail or prison time. She has exceeded prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations nine times and granted them 14 times, while court-wide, judges have sentenced below government recommendation about 80 percent of the time.
“It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort, is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment,” Chutkan has explained from the bench, according to the Washington Post.
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