As former United States President Donald Trump was yesterday indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, he faces Jamaican-born Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan who presides over the case.
Judge Chutkan received her bachelor’s degree in economics from George Washington University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1987. She worked in private practice for three years before joining the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, where she worked as a trial attorney and supervisor for over a decade. She then joined the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner LLP and specialized in litigation and white-collar criminal defense for 12 years.
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Former President Obama appointed Chutkan to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014. The Senate approved her appointment by a 95-0 vote.
Her involvement in Jan. 6 cases is known as she set tougher sentences than requested by the Justice Department in a number of cases, sentencing at least 31 people convicted of Capitol riot-related crimes, citing the necessity of consequences for taking part in the insurrection.
She said, “There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said at one of their hearings.
She has previously dealt with Trump, denying his 2021 motion to halt records from being turned over to the Jan. 6 committee, writing, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not president.” She also wrote that Trump could not claim that his executive privilege “exists in perpetuity”.
Chutkan is a trained dancer, and is married to Peter Krauthamer, 65, a former Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. They have two sons.
