Government of Minnesota Tim Walz has appointed two women to fill judge vacancies in the Second Judicial District, which includes Ramsey County.
On Friday, the governor announced that Veena Iyer and Jennifer Verdeja would fill these roles.
The two will fill the vacancies created when JaPaul Harris moved to the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Elena Ostby retired, according to a news release.
Verdeja is deputy director of the Trial and Pretrial Justice Division of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. She previously served as an assistant attorney general in the Second Judicial District, a community corrections officer for Ramsey County, and served on the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Human Trafficking Investigators Task Force and the Second District Ethics Commission.
Iyer is the executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. She was previously a shareholder at Nilan Johnson Lewis, an Equal Justice Works fellow at Legal Aid Chicago, a law clerk for Judge Natalie Hudson of the Minnesota Court of Appeals, Judge Susan Burke of the Fourth Judicial District, and Judge Matthew of the U.S. District Court for the Northern district of Illinois. Kennelly.
