A L U M N I
P R O F I L E
From Teacher to Judge, Grad Moved from Bench to Federal Defender
Katherian Roe
“Since I was a kid I always wanted to be a lawyer and practice Indian law.”
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You expect to hear a Midwestern flatness in the voice of Katherian Roe ’84, who’s spent the past 17 years in Minnesota as a District Court Judge and Federal Public Defender. What you detect, instead, is a lilting, sibilant sound and forceful phrasings that belie her Native American and Chicana roots. From her speech patterns to her philosophy of law, it’s clear that Roe, who traces her heritage to the Oklahoma Cherokee tribe, never abandoned a deep commitment to providing quality legal representation to Native Americans and other people marginalized in American society. “My family didn’t want me to become a lawyer because people of color often don’t trust the legal system,” Roe said by phone from her office in Minneapolis, where, as the appointed Federal Public Defender for Minnesota, she oversees a staff of 20 and 100 additional lawyers retained
periodically for a conflict panel program. Her office handles about 65 percent of all the federal criminal cases throughout the state of Minnesota. Her caseload each year includes dozens of felonies, including homicides, arsons, serious assaults and other major crimes committed on the state’s Indian reservations. She also handles white-collar crime such as securities and tax fraud, as well as major drug conspiracies and serious gun offenses. Roe chose to practice in Minnesota, in part, because more than 55,000 American Indian and Alaska Natives live there, making it the 13th largest statewide total in the nation. Of those, about 17,000 American Indians live on reservations within the state’s boundaries. In addition to the significant Indian population, Minnesota is one of the few states where the federal government exercises criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed on Indian reservations. “Since I was a kid I always wanted to be a lawyer and practice Indian law,” she said. “I became a lawyer to help people, not to make money or be famous or powerful. I found that I can help people by practicing law in Indian country.” Attending law school seemed to be out-of-reach while Roe was growing up. She moved from Kansas City to the Capital Region and lived in Cohoes and Catskill while her mother, a single parent, struggled to support and raise Roe and her sister through clerical and waitress jobs. “No one had ever graduated from high school in my family,” she said. “I was lucky to have received wonderful opportunities along the way, beginning with Albany
Law School,” said Roe, who was one of just eight minority students among the roughly 220 students who entered law school with her in 1981. It was a time of change for the law school as it made efforts to ensure that the student body was more representative of the community at large. At Albany Law, Roe was involved with the fledgling Minority Students Association and played the club sports of rugby and basketball. She graduated in 1984 and was a recipient of the national Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship, which allowed her to practice Indian law on the 11 Indian reservations of Wisconsin for three years. She handled education and employment discrimination lawsuits, hunting and fishing treaty rights and other cases on behalf of Wisconsin Indian tribes. That work led to a fellowship at Georgetown Law School, where she was a teaching fellow and earned a Master of Laws advanced degree in trial advocacy in 1989. She took the job of Assistant Federal Defender of Minnesota in 1989, and was appointed a District Court Judge by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 2001. In 2006 she resigned from the bench to accept the appointment as Federal Defender for the District of Minnesota. The secret to her accomplishments has been the simple lesson of hard work that she learned as a youngster. “I’m very thorough and well-prepared and I have a passion about the work I do,” she said. In her spare time, Roe, who is open about being a lesbian, raises a 19-year-old son with her longtime female partner. The family enjoys skiing, hiking and canoeing.—Paul Grondahl