In May 1996, Reggie B. Walton traveled to Irkutsk, Russia, to teach criminal law to Russian judges in a program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Bar Association. The trip reflected a career built across defense, prosecution, local judging, federal judging and national policy commissions.
Walton was born in Donora, Pennsylvania, on February 8, 1949, and took a football scholarship to West Virginia State College, graduating in 1971. He earned his law degree at American University in 1974. His first legal work was with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, representing criminal defendants, from 1974 to 1976. He then became an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, where he served as chief of the Career Criminal Unit and received the Justice Department's award for superior performance before becoming the office's executive assistant U.S. attorney.
Presidents of both parties appointed him along the way. Ronald Reagan named him an associate judge of the D.C. Superior Court in 1981, where he led the Family Division and the Domestic Violence Unit and served as deputy presiding judge of the Criminal Division. In 1989, he left the court to serve in President George H. W. Bush's White House as associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and senior White House adviser for crime. Bush returned him to the Superior Court in 1991, and he served there until 2001.
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Walton to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. His high-profile trials there included the perjury and obstruction case of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and the perjury trial of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens. In 2004, Bush named him chair of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which Congress created to study sexual abuse in custody. The commission submitted its recommendations in 2009; the attorney general substantially adopted them and they were implemented in federal prisons. Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Walton to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2007 and elevated him to its presiding judge in 2013. He took senior status on the district court in 2015.
