Charlotte M. Cooksey

The Honorable Judge Charlotte M. Cooksey was a visionary and an innovator who used her position to advocate for the disenfranchised, particularly women, who interfaced with the criminal justice system. Her judicial activism was novel then and would be considered so now.

Shortly after completing her VISTA service, she returned to the city of her birth, Baltimore, to pursue her career at Maryland Legal Aid. While there, she started a unit for representation in children in need of assistance cases. The CINA Project has become a state-wide initiative. She left Legal Aid in 1979 to assume her first position in Maryland’s court system as a Master in Chancery in the Division of Juvenile Causes at the Baltimore City Circuit Court. After four years as a Master, she was appointed to the District Court of Maryland, District 1 (Baltimore City), at age 35 in 1983. Cooksey served as an Associate Judge on the District Court for 25 years, until she retired in 2008. Her last six years on the bench were spent as the presiding judge of Baltimore’s Mental Health Court, the first such court in Maryland, a problem-solving court that Cooksey created.

Among the state’s first judicial officers to recognize the biological basis of addiction and the criminalization of people living with a mental illness, Cooksey effectively advocated a seismic shift in judicial approach. She was willing to risk her reputation by promoting experimental approaches that could have failed. In the mid-1990s, Cooksey supported a pilot acupuncture program for drug-addicted women in Baltimore’s jail. She played a key role in a demonstration project designed to address chronic school truancy. This program was selected as a finalist for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Herman Goldstein Award. In 2002, Cooksey presided over a group of cases that alleged excessive heat and other unhealthy conditions in the Women’s Detention Center. She visited the facility and, appalled by her observations, ordered health exams and a proposed alternative housing plan. A civil rights investigation ensued and a federal court ordered improvements. In 2007, she, along with other women judges and partners, was instrumental in the creation of the Pregnant Women’s Transitional Program, Chrysalis House Healthy Start, which provides holistic and trauma-sensitive care to pregnant women offenders.

In 2012, she wrote the court’s Mental Health Procedures Manual, which is still used by the judiciary today. Cooksey’s enduring contributions to Maryland’s citizens were the creation of the state’s first mental health court; its problem-solving court progeny across the state; elevating our state’s judicial approach towards people living with a mental illness; and normalizing a humane treatment approach to marginalized populations in the criminal justice system.

“It has been my experience that success in positively impacting a systemic or societal problem comes not from one person’s work alone, but rather from the collaboration of many.” – Hon. Charlotte M. Cooksey