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Amy Berman Jackson Biography
Amy Berman Jackson is an American Judge. She is United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Amy Berman Jackson
Amy Berman Jackson Education
Jackson received her A.B. cum laude from Harvard College in 1976 and her Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1979.
Amy Berman Jackson Legal career
After graduating from law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Harrison L. Winter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. From 1980 to 1986, Jackson served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, where she received Department of Justice Special Achievement Awards for her work on high-profile murder and sexual assault cases in 1985 and 1986. From 1986 to 1994, she was an associate and then a partner at Venable, Baetjer, Howard and Civiletti.
From 2000 until her appointment as a federal judge, Jackson was a member of the law firm Trout Cacheris & Solomon PLLC in Washington, D.C. where she specialized in criminal investigations and defense, complex litigation, criminal trials, civil trials, and appeals.
In 2009, she represented nine-term Representative for Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district William J. Jefferson in his corruption trial.
Amy Berman Jackson Photo
Jackson has also served as an expert legal commentator for many news organizations, including Fox News Channel, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC.
Amy Berman Jackson Political Affiliation
Berman Jackson served on the board of the Washington D.C. Rape Crisis Center and has also been a member of the Parent Steering Committee of the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders.
Amy Berman Jackson Paul Manafort
In October 2017, Amy Berman Jackson was assigned to preside over the criminal case that Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.
Jackson accepted their “not guilty” pleas, granted bail, confiscated their passports, and ordered them to be held under house arrest. She also warned defense lawyers not to discuss the case outside of court.
On June 15, 2018, after the prosecution accused Manafort of attempted witness tampering, Jackson revoked his bail and sent him to jail until his upcoming federal trials to prevent him from having contact with people.
On February 23, 2018, Rick Gates pleaded guilty to one count of false statements and one count of conspiracy against the United States. The plea bargain included an agreement to cooperate Robert with the Mueller investigation.
On September 14, 2018, Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States. The plea bargain included an agreement to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.
On February 13, 2019, Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had to lied to Mueller’s office, the FBI and a grand jury after his guilty plea about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a man the FBI believes has ties to Russian intelligence agencies. She ruled that the special counsel was no longer bound by the terms of Manafort’s plea, which included advocating a sentence reduction for him.
On March 11, 2019, Amy Berman Jackson ordered Paul Manafort to serve an additional 43 months in prison, on top of his sentence he received last week from the court in Virginia.
Amy Berman Jackson Roger Stone
In January 2019, Amy Berman was assigned the case of Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Trump, following his indictment by the Mueller investigation on seven counts including false statements, obstruction, and witness tampering.
On February 15, after Stone spent several days railing against the charges in a series of public appearances and interviews, Jackson imposed a limited gag order on him and his attorneys.
On February 18, Roger Stone published an Instagram post with an attack on Jackson along with a picture of her that many commentators perceived as a possible threat.
Stone later took it down and apologized, but Jackson ordered him to a February 21 court hearing at which she tightened the terms of his gag order, saying, “From this moment on, the defendant may not speak publicly about this case—period.”
Amy Berman Jackson Hillary Clinton
In May 2017, Amy Berman Jackson dismissed a wrongful death suit filed against Hillary Clinton by the parents of two of the Americans killed in the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, on the basis of the Westfall Act.
Amy Berman Jackson Federal Judicial Service
On June 17, 2010, President Obama nominated Amy Berman to fill a vacant seat on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that was created by the transition to senior status in 2007 by Judge Gladys Kessler.
Jackson’s nomination lapsed at the end of 2010, but she was renominated by Obama on January 5, 2011. The United States Senate confirmed Jackson in a 97–0 vote on March 17, 2011. The next day she received her commission.
Amy Berman Jackson Age
She was born on July 22, 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. She is 64 years old as of 2018.
Amy Berman Jackson Family
Jackson is the daughter of Mildred (Sauber) and Barnett Berman, a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Amy Berman Jackson Husband
Jackson is married to Darryl W. Jackson, who in 2005 worked in Export Enforcement as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for George W. Bush after leaving the Arnold & Porter firm. The couple has a son, Matt Jackson.
Amy Berman Jackson News
Amy Berman Jackson Sentences Paul Manafort 3.5 More Years in Prison
Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who was sentenced last week to nearly four years in prison, was ordered on Wednesday to serve an additional three and a half years for conspiracy, closing out the special counsel’s highest-profile prosecution.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Federal District Court in Washington sentenced Mr. Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy counts that encompassed a host of crimes, including money-laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to disclose lobbying work that earned him tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade.
“It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved,” Judge Jackson said of Mr. Manafort’s case. She added, “A significant portion of his career has been spent gaming the system.”
Each charge carried a maximum of five years. But Judge Jackson noted that one count was closely tied to the same bank and tax fraud scheme that a federal judge in Virginia had sentenced Mr. Manafort for last week. Under sentencing guidelines, she said, those punishments should largely overlap, not be piled on top of each other.
Mr. Manafort asked the judge not to add to his time behind bars. “This case has taken everything from me, already,” he said, running through a list of his financial assets that now belong to the government. “Please let my wife and I be together,” he added, speaking from a wheelchair because gout has made it difficult for him to stand.
Mr. Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing told the judge that while he was not accusing the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller, of mounting a politically motivated prosecution, “but for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I don’t think we would be here today.”
But Andrew Weissmann, one of Mr. Mueller’s top deputies, said Mr. Manafort had squandered his education and a wealth of opportunities to lead a criminal conspiracy for more than a decade. Once caught, he obstructed justice by tampering with two witnesses, he said, and then repeatedly lied to prosecutors and to a grand jury after he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office in September.
“He served to undermine — not promote — American ideals of honesty, transparency and playing by the rules,” he said.
Mr. Manafort’s case stood out in many ways, not the least of which is because it was brought by the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. It is rare than the government reaches a plea deal and then pulls out, claiming that the defendant has deceived them instead of cooperating.
Judge Jackson ruled earlier that Mr. Manafort breached his plea agreement by lying, but prosecutors have not publicly disclosed why they consider those lies important, saying they wanted to protect an open investigation. That was expected to make it harder for Judge Jackson, who takes pride in explaining herself in terms that ordinary people can understand, to describe how she arrived at her sentence.
In another oddity, Mr. Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Judge Jackson, and the related case overseen by Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. Last week, Judge Ellis sentenced Mr. Manafort to 47 months in prison for eight felony counts of tax evasion, bank fraud and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.
Judge Ellis’s sentence set off a firestorm of criticism from commentators who complained it was overly lenient for a defendant who had orchestrated a multimillion-dollar fraud over a decade. Much of the legal world considered the sentencing guidelines in the Virginia case, which called for a prison term of 19 to 24 years, far too harsh. But some public defenders and former prosecutors said a 47-month sentence exemplified the sentencing disparities in a criminal justice system that favors wealthy, white-collar criminals.
Instead, some predicted, she would most likely allow Mr. Manafort to serve his sentences simultaneously, which would cap his prison term at 10 years.
“What is happening today is not and cannot be a review and a revision by a sentence imposed by another court,” Judge Jackson said on Wednesday, referring to the sentence Mr. Manafort received last week.
Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that Mr. Trump could pardon Mr. Manafort. Asked about that possibility, Mr. Trump’s answers have varied. He said late last year that he “wouldn’t take it off the table.” More recently, he said, “I don’t even discuss it.”
Asked about a pardon on Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “The president has made his position on that clear, and he’ll make a decision when he is ready.”
Last June, when Judge Jackson revoked Mr. Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail after prosecutors filed new charges of witness tampering, President Trump said Mr. Manafort was being treated like a mafia boss.
“Who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and ‘Public Enemy Number One,” or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement — although convicted of nothing?” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
State prosecutors in Manhattan are said to be preparing charges against Mr. Manafort to help ensure he will serve prison time even if Mr. Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.
Judge Jackson is comfortable with complex decisions, said Robert P. Trout, a defense lawyer who runs the law firm where she worked for a decade before President Barack Obama appointed her to the bench in 2011. “If anyone can get their head around the complexities and sensibilities of the sentencing considerations in play here, it is Judge Jackson,” Mr. Trout said.
The special counsel has not requested a specific sentence in any criminal case it has brought. In the case before Judge Jackson, prosecutors said that Mr. Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws and did not deserve any breaks. Even though sentencing guidelines recommended a prison term of up to 22 years, the maximum sentence is governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so is limited to 10 years.
Judge Jackson tends to be relatively lenient on convicted criminals who appear before her. In the five years that ended in 2017, she handed down an average prison sentence of just 32 months, below both the Washington district’s 46-month average and the nationwide average of 47 months, according to court data maintained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
But Judge Jackson has gone out of her way to make clear that being well-connected earns no chits in her court. “She knows who commits white-collar crime,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington lawyer who represented an embezzler in her court. “And she thinks it’s perfectly fine to punish them if they commit a crime and hold them to a higher standard because they have the education, and because they have the wealth.”
Six years ago, she sentenced the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to 30 months in prison for stealing $750,000 from his campaign to pay personal expenses. He had asked for probation. But she told him: “How would I explain a probationary sentence to those troubled youths who are locked up, who didn’t start where you started, and were not given what you were given?
“It would be read one way and one way only, as a clear statement that there are two systems of justice: one for the well-connected, and one for everyone else,” she added. “I cannot do it. I will not do it.”
Adopted from: www.nytimes.com
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