Advertisement
President Trump has attacked the case and the judge as biased. She seems unlikely to be ruffled.
WASHINGTON — Amy Berman Jackson is no stranger to working under pressure.
As a federal prosecutor three decades ago, she was in the final hours of a momentous murder trial when prospective jurors for her next trial — an armed robbery case against three defendants — showed up in the same courthouse.
Rather than delay that case, she broke away from the murder trial long enough to pick the jury for it. Then she returned to deliver her closing argument against the murder defendant. And while those jurors weighed their verdict, she delivered her opening statement about why the armed robbery defendants should be convicted.
All before lunch.
Now a federal judge in Washington, Ms. Jackson faces another high-stakes morning on Thursday when she sentences Roger J. Stone Jr., President Trump’s longtime friend and former campaign adviser, for obstructing a congressional investigation.
Mr. Trump and his allies have already denounced Mr. Stone’s prosecution as a vendetta and attacked Judge Jackson as biased, and the case is at the center of a Justice Department storm over fears of political interference. The invective is only likely to grow should she send Mr. Stone to prison, as expected.
She seems unlikely to be ruffled. The judge has already faced public attacks and threats over her handling of other cases against Mr. Trump’s associates with the same composure she showed in the courtroom decades ago.
“No judge should have to face this kind of pressure,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal judge. She described Mr. Trump’s criticism of Judge Jackson as “preposterous.”
But “nobody who knows her thinks she cannot handle it,” Ms. Gertner said. “She is tough and independent and very smart. She will steel herself against political influence and focus on the facts and the law.”
Largely because related cases are generally assigned to the same judge, Judge Jackson, 65, has overseen most of the cases from the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Besides Mr. Stone’s, that included the prosecutions of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman; Rick Gates, his former deputy campaign chairman; and Gregory B. Craig, a former aide to President Barack Obama who worked with Mr. Manafort in Ukraine.
Judge Jackson’s rulings in the past 20 months have generated such wall-to-wall news coverage that some of her fellow jurists are said to be quietly envious of her celebrity. Among other headline-making decisions: She revoked Mr. Manafort’s bail and ordered him to await trial in a local jail; imposed a limited gag order against Mr. Stone and then vastly broadened it after he threatened her on social media; sentenced Mr. Manafort to three and a half years in prison; oversaw the trials of Mr. Stone and Mr. Craig; and refused to grant Mr. Gates’s probation despite the pleas of both the prosecutors and the defense lawyers.
Legal observers say her distinguishing trait is the evenhandedness of her rulings, unswayed by the histrionics of defense lawyers, prosecutors or defendants themselves. Mr. Stone’s case is one example.
Judge Jackson was visibly angry after Mr. Stone, 67, posted a photo of her on social media with the image of cross hairs next to her head — then lied about it on the witness stand when she hauled him into court. She warned that she would jail him if he violated her orders again.
But she overlooked a few minor lapses that followed. And she refused the prosecution’s request that she jail Mr. Stone after a jury found him guilty of seven felony counts in November, allowing him instead to await his sentencing date at home with his family in Florida.
Judge Jackson described her decision in December to sentence Mr. Gates to 45 days in jail as agonizing. He pleaded guilty soon after his indictment, then spent about 500 hours helping prosecutors and F.B.I. agents. But she said she could not let someone who had executed a criminal financial scheme for years out of “plain old-fashioned greed” escape time behind bars.
She has said private practice taught her that defendants’ choices depend too much on the size of their bank accounts, and that sentencing guidelines “don’t make sense to people’s mothers.”
In general, she tends to be relatively lenient in sentencing. In the five years that ended in 2017, for example, she handed down an average prison sentence of 32 months, below the Washington district’s average of 46 months and the nationwide average of 47 months, according to court data maintained by Syracuse University.
A Baltimore native, Judge Jackson writes music, sings, dances and is gifted at mimicry. One of her virtues, she once said, is that she does not take herself too seriously.
Appointed by Mr. Obama in 2011, she took a somewhat unusual path to the federal bench. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she worked for six years as a federal prosecutor in Washington, trying 50 cases. She spent the next eight years in private practice, becoming a partner at the Washington law firm now known as Venable.
Then she took a six-year break from the law to raise her two sons. Returning to practice, she persuaded the defense firm Trout Cacheris to allow her to leave the office every day at 2 p.m. so she could be home for her children.
In sentencing hearings, Judge Jackson sometimes seems to be reading from notes, illuminated by a small blue and white ceramic lamp that adorns her bench. Such preparation, Ms. Gertner said, is the mark of a careful judge determined to guard against bias and the urge to “emote from the bench.”
Friends say she thrives on the kaleidoscope of challenges of a federal courtroom — intellectual, emotional and practical. One friend recalled how once, when one of her high heels snapped off in the middle of a trial, she simply slipped out of her shoes and continued questioning her witness in her stocking feet.
Only the threats against her seemed to take her aback.
Just last week, Mr. Trump sent ripples of concern throughout the ranks of federal judges by attacking Judge Jackson on Twitter. Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief justice of the Federal District Court in Washington, declared in a statement that “public criticism or pressure” did not affect the sentencing decisions of “the judges of this court.”
While Judge Jackson has steered clear of political references in court, she has sometimes seemed to counter Trump administration rhetoric. She has insisted that in a courtroom, at least, truth matters, that “facts” are different from “alternative facts,” and that a deliberate effort to “obscure the facts undermines our political discourse.”
Noah Weiland contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
