The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed a senior prosecutor in the Southern District of New York to a seat on the federal bench and approved President Joe Biden's nominee to become Minnesota's first Latino federal district court judge.
The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 49-46 in favor of Margaret Garnett becoming a federal district court judge in Manhattan and 49-46 for Judge Jeffrey Bryan to join the federal bench in Minnesota.
Biden, a Democrat, has now won Senate confirmation of 156 judicial nominees. The vast majority of them have been women and people of color, in keeping with the president's campaign pledge to diversify the federal bench.
Garnett before being tapped in May to become a judge in Southern District of New York served since 2021 as the deputy to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and now is special counsel in his office.
She had previously for three years served as the commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, the agency tasked with examining fraud, corruption and abuse of power within the city government.
In that role, she oversaw an investigation into the New York Police Department's handling of racial justice protests that followed the death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
A report released by the DOI found that the NYPD's response was excessive in part because most police officers involved had not received "relevant training" in policing protests, and the report suggested ways to reform training.
Before that, she served from 2005 to 2017 as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and worked from 2017 to 2018 in the New York State Attorney General’s Office. She had earlier been an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Bryan, whose family is of Mexican descent, began his career as an associate at the law firm Robins Kaplan before working a federal prosecutor in Minnesota from 2007 to 2013.
Then-Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, appointed him to be a state court judge in St. Paul in 2013, and in 2019, Governor Tim Walz elevated him to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, the state's intermediate appellate court.
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