Tanya Chutkan
*Tanya Chutkan was born on this date in 1962. She is an Afro Caribbean lawyer and judge. Tanya Sue Chutkan was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 from George Washington University and a Juris Doctor in 1987 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
From 1987 to 1990, she worked at the Hogan & Hartson LLP law firm. From 1990 to 1991, she worked at the Donovan, Leisure, Rogovin, Huge & Schiller law firm. From 1991 to 2002, she was a trial attorney and supervisor at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. She was a partner at the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where her practice focused on complex civil litigation and, specifically, antitrust class action cases.
Her husband, Peter Krauthammer, a judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, was nominated by President Obama on July 11, 2011, and sworn in on April 20, 2012. They have two sons.
In 2013, President Obama nominated Chutkan as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, to a new seat created under 104 Stat. 5089, on July 1, 2013. She received a hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on February 25, 2014. On March 27, 2014, her nomination was reported out of the committee by voice vote. On June 4, 2014, the United States Senate voted in favor of the final confirmation by 95–0. She received her judicial commission on June 5, 2014.
Notable cases:
In February 2017, Public Resource Org was sued by the American Society for Testing and Materials, the National Fire Protection Association, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, and other entities for scanning and making available building codes and fire codes which these organizations consider their copyrighted property. Chutkan ruled against Public Resource Org, ordering all the standards to be deleted from the Internet.
In 2017 Chutkan presided over the Imran Awan and Hina Alvi fraud case. In Garza v. Hargan (2017), Chutkan ordered the Office of Refugee Resettlement to allow a girl in its care to have an abortion. That ruling was vacated by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, reinstated by the full en banc D.C. Circuit, and ultimately mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 2018, Chutkan certified a class action and ordered the government to provide access to abortions to all girls in ORR's custody.
On June 8, 2018, Chutkan blocked until June 20 the release in Syrian Democratic Forces-controlled territory of a dual-nationality Saudi-American citizen alleged to have joined ISIL. The man, who held for nine months in Iraq, was planned to be released by the U.S. military with a new cell phone, some food and water and $4,210 in cash, and his Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) identification card, as soon as the next day.
On March 7, 2019, Chutkan ruled that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos illegally delayed the implementation of the "Equity in IDEA" regulations. These regulations updated how states calculate racial disparities in identifying children as eligible for special education, placing children in restrictive classroom settings, and using exclusionary discipline.
Chutkan also ruled that the U.S. Department of Education violated the law concerning the spread of regulations by neglecting to provide a "reasoned explanation" for the delay and failing to account for the costs that children, parents, and society would bear. On April 26, 2019, Chutkan sentenced Maria Butina to 18 months in prison for conspiring to be an unregistered Russian government agent in the United States.
On November 20, 2019, Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Justice. She found that federal inmates sentenced to death were likely to succeed in arguing the federal government's new lethal injection procedure. The procedure uses a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug combination previously in place--"exceeds statutory authority" under the Federal Death Penalty Act. Chutkan's order was reversed by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and the case is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
On November 9, 2021, former President Donald Trump's plea to keep records from being released to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was denied by Chutkan.
