Sarah Gad, ’20, Profiled in The Washington Post
She was a felon who was addicted to drugs. Then she became a lawyer.
At the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis, immediately after her client’s murder case was dismissed, attorney Sarah Gad ran into Chief Judge Toddrick Barnette.
She knew him because nearly a decade ago, he was the presiding judge when she was a defendant facing drug charges in his courtroom. She approached him in the courthouse lobby on July 19, and reintroduced herself. Right away, her face was familiar to him.
“Sarah, what are you doing here?” Barnette asked Gad.
Although little about him had changed in nearly a decade, Gad said, almost everything about her had. The last time they saw each other, she was a convicted criminal and a repeat drug offender. Now, she’s a lawyer — defending people like her younger self.
As Gad told Barnette how her life had unfolded since their last encounter, “he was shocked, to say the least,” said Gad, 36. “It took a moment for him to register that I was both a defendant in his courtroom all those years ago, and that I was now a practicing attorney in his courthouse.”
Read more at The Washington Post