Patricia Broderick, former D.C. Superior Court judge, dies at 75
Patricia Broderick, former D.C. Superior Court judge, dies at 75
Patricia A. Broderick, who was paralyzed in an automobile accident during college and overcame her disability to attend law school, become a Justice Department lawyer and serve for more than two decades as a D.C. Superior Court judge, died June 17 at a care facility in the District. She was 75.
She had respiratory infections complicated by pulmonary weakness stemming from her paralysis, said her executor, Elizabeth Francis.
In 1970, shortly before the start of her senior year at what is now Trinity Washington University, Ms. Broderick was in Pennsylvania on a road trip with friends when she suffered a spinal cord injury in a crash.
The accident left her paralyzed from the chest down. After a period of rehabilitation, she returned to her university studies and eventually pursued a legal career.
Ms. Broderick in an undated photo.
Ms. Broderick prosecuted murder, sexual assault and other felony cases as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District before moving in 1989 to the Justice Department’s money laundering section. She was serving as a special counsel to the Department’s office on violence against women when President Bill Clinton nominated her to the D.C. Superior Court.
Ms. Broderick assumed her seat in 1998 and remained on the bench until taking senior status in 2020, presiding over criminal, civil and family court cases.
Outside the court, she pushed for greater rights and accommodations for people with disabilities. For work and for pleasure, Ms. Broderick visited 66 countries and spoke frankly about the struggles she sometimes faced while traveling.
She had to be “strapped onto a chair and carried past people” to board some planes, she said. And “because you’re an inconvenience,” she remarked, “you’re the last one off. It seems to me that if we can put a man on the moon, we can fix some of these things.”
Ms. Broderick in 2024.
Patricia Ann Broderick, one of three children, was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1949. She grew up in New Jersey, where her father worked as a flavor chemist and her mother managed the home.
Ms. Broderick moved to Washington to attend what was then Trinity College, where she completed her coursework for a degree in sociology in 1971. Aiming to help others recover from accidents like the one she had suffered, she studied rehabilitation counseling, receiving a master’s degree in that field from George Washington University in 1974.
She became interested in the law while working as a probation and parole officer, enrolled at Catholic University’s law school and graduated in 1981.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Ms. Broderick held roles at the Treasury Department, where she helped negotiate a money laundering information exchange agreement with Paraguay.
Clinton nominated her to the Superior Court in 1997, and she received confirmation the following year.
Ms. Broderick said that her disability did not affect her work on the court.
“I think when people see the wheelchair come in, they’re really surprised and they don’t know what to expect,” she remarked in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington last year. “I think it opens them up. I think you can do a lot with that surprise.”
In addition to her service on the bench, Ms. Broderick taught at George Washington University’s law school.
Her survivors include two brothers.
Ms. Broderick skied on snow, using an adaptive monoski, as well as on water, describing the latter activity as one that “frees your spirit and makes your body less of an enemy and more of a friend.”
Her memoir, “Reinventing the Wheel: Hard Roads Can Lead to Beautiful Places,” co-written with Paul S. Bradley, was published last year.
Because her disability sometimes required her to ask for help, Ms. Broderick had an opportunity to see into other people’s “souls,” she once told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Those people might not know at first how to relate to her, she continued, but then they “find out I am just a human being.”
