November 10, 2017
California Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed an Iranian-American immigrant to serve as a judge in the Santa Clara County Superior Court.
Brown’s pick, Nahal Iravani-Sani, is currently a prosecutor in the county. She emigrated from Iran to the United States in 1979 when she was 10 years old.
She becomes the fourth Iranian-American serving as a Superior Court judge in California.
Fresh out of law school, she volunteered in the mid-1990s to work for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Three months later, then-District Attorney George Kennedy hired her. She has been a prosecutor for the 22 years since then.
“I truly feel humbled to be chosen and honored to serve the community,” Iravani-Sani said.
Now 48, she is married with a son in high school and another in his freshman year of college. She is a Democrat. Judges earn an annual salary of $200,042. She is now one of 84 judges in the Santa Clara court system. There are 58 counties in California.
The position of judge is elective in California, with the governor making appointments when a vacancy occurs in mid-term. Iravani-Sani will face the voters next fall.
While prosecuting sex offenders for failing to register with police, she told the Huffington Post last year, she noticed that sex offenders who were mentally ill kept getting thrown in jail for failing to register. Working with judges and defense attorneys, she created a process to transfer supervision of such offenders to the Mental Health Court, where they are seen monthly and may register there.
“I am proudest of this local reform because I collaborated with my colleagues across the criminal justice system to implement a new policy and to address a longstanding issue that had existed for years, but no one had taken the initiative to address in the past,” she said.
The Bay Area News Group said Iravani-Sani is “known for her friendly, collegial manner.”
She has taught at the Stanford Law School’s Trial Advocacy Clinic since 2013 and was a lecturer at the Santa Clara University’s law school in trial techniques from 2006 to 2013.
Iravani-Sani also is a member of the Iranian American Bar Association Board of Advisors and the Pars Equality Center Advisory Board. She went to law school at Santa Clara University after graduating from the University of California-Irvine.
Iravani-Sani was one of 34 judicial appointments Governor Brown made last week to fill vacancies on the bench—56 percent of them were women.
The other Iranian-American judges in California are Susan Etezadi in San Meteo County and Sheila Meskin Hanson and Andre Manssourian in Orange County. Hanson and Etezadi were both in the United States and had American mothers. Manssourian was born into the Armenian community in Iran.