Her Books

As a judge in Denver in the 1990s, I was expected to be impartial, restrained, and above all, neutral. I became controversial—for my rulings in protest cases involving public figures and in domestic violence work.  Sometimes cases reflected issues from my personal life that fractured my own family when I crossed racial and sexual lines. Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss is a literary memoir about what happens when justice is practiced as a form of love—and when love itself becomes grounds for judgment

I spent years issuing verdicts—some that freed, some that confined, all that carried consequences I could not control once they left my hands. But the verdicts that marked me most were not rendered from the bench. They came quietly, from my own family, after I married across racial lines only a few days after the famous Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court decision banned statutes prohibiting interracial marriage. I know how judgment is formed: by evidence, by bias, by fear, by love. I am not here to persuade you. I am here to tell you what I did, what it cost, and what it demanded of me. The law shaped my work. Love shaped my life. The verdict, now, is yours.