Leonie Brinkema

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Courtroom sketch by Bill Hennessy

Leonie M. Brinkema (born 1944, in Teaneck, New Jersey) is a United States District Court judge, in the Eastern District of Virginia.

From Dutch descent, judge Brinkema received her B.A. from Douglass College in 1966 and undertook graduate studies in philosophy at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1966) and New York University (1967-1969). She earned her M.L.S. at Rutgers University in 1970 and her J.D. at Cornell University in 1976.

She worked in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1976-1977, and then the U.S. Attorney's office in the Eastern District of Virginia, Criminal Division from 1977 to 1983. During 1983-1984 she returned to the Criminal Division and worked as a solo practitioner from 1984-1985. She was appointed a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia in 1985, and worked in that role until 1993.

In 1993, Brinkema was nominated by President Bill Clinton for promotion to the bench of the Eastern District of Virginia, and took up her post on October 23, 1993.

She was the presiding judge who oversaw one of the major cases in the legal dispute between the Church of Scientology and its Internet critics. Specifically, in November of 1995 she ruled in favor of the defendants on a lawsuit filed by the Church of Scientology against the Washington Post newspaper and anti-Scientology activist Arnie Lerma.

On October 28, 2003, she sentenced al-Qaeda operative Iyman Faris to twenty years imprisonment for providing material support to the group.

Brinkema presided over the case of suspected 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. [1] As she sentenced Moussaoui to life in a supermax prison, she told him he would "die with a whimper." [2]