Juneau District Court Judge Kirsten Swanson has a rock on her desk.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a small stone, smooth and just the right size to fit in the palm of your hand. On it is engraved a measurement: 5,280 feet, the number of feet in a mile.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s my milestone,\u201d Swanson said Friday, smiling.<\/p>\n
This week, Swanson will finish her first month on the job. In the first week of December, she replaced Keith Levy on the district court bench.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been even better than I was expecting,\u201d Swanson said, adding that it\u2019s a job she\u2019s wanted for a long time.<\/p>\n
Before being appointed to the bench by Gov. Bill Walker last year, Swanson had worked for 13 years as a self-employed defense attorney. From an office on Harris Street, she defended clients in district, superior and federal court.<\/p>\n
She worked in the natural resources section of the Alaska Attorney General\u2019s office and as a public defender before that.<\/p>\n
Between 1996 and 1999, she served in the U.S. Army\u2019s Judge Advocate General\u2019s Corps, serving as a trial defense lawyer for accused soldiers.<\/p>\n
When her tour of duty ended, she returned to Juneau, a place she had interned as a law student.<\/p>\n
Swanson grew up in Oregon; she picked berries and fruit in summer to make extra money as a teenager. She worked in a department store on weekends and summers while in high school, then in the Clackmas County Sheriff\u2019s office while she attended the University of Oregon.<\/p>\n
After she graduated, she worked in Clackmas County Jail and Prison until she left for law school at Gonzaga in 1992.<\/p>\n
While she\u2019s been on the defense side of the courtroom more often than not, Swanson said she\u2019s fascinated by district court. She applied for a Juneau vacancy in 2010 and a Bethel district court vacancy in 2013, but she didn\u2019t get either. The third time was the charm in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, district court is the crossroads,\u201d she explained. \u201cAnybody could end up in district court.\u201d<\/p>\n
District court cases range from serious criminal matters to common or obscure civil incidents.<\/p>\n
In the past month, Swanson said she\u2019s had to brush up on her civil law and has encountered a learning curve in some unexpected ways. More than once, she\u2019s tried walking out of the courtroom with case files, only for a clerk to jump up and ask for them back. Those were her responsibility as an attorney, but not anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s about letting go of control,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also had to make some changes in her personal life. She can\u2019t hang out with her fellow attorneys as she once did.<\/p>\n
\u201cLuckily, I have a lot of friends who are not attorneys,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Each time she enters the courtroom and the call \u201call rise\u201d goes out, she\u2019s reminded of her time in the JAG Corps and how enlisted men would stand when an officer entered the room.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a milestone that\u2019s come back around, but this time, she\u2019s being called \u201cyour honor\u201d instead of \u201cCaptain.\u201d <\/p>\n
Does she think she\u2019ll be around a while?<\/p>\n
\u201cBoy, I hope so,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juneau District Court Judge Kirsten Swanson has a rock on her desk. It\u2019s a small stone, smooth and just the right size to fit in the palm of your hand. On it is engraved a measurement: 5,280 feet, the number of feet in a mile. \u201cIt\u2019s my milestone,\u201d Swanson said Friday, smiling. This week, Swanson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":5664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5663"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}